Down­siz­ing

After a whole string of wry, rel­a­tive­ly small-scale, char­ac­ter-dri­ven movies like Side­ways and Nebras­ka, writer/​director Alexan­der Payne goes all high-con­cept with his lat­est offer­ing, seem­ing­ly pitched clos­er to the mul­ti­plex than his usu­al art­house audi­ence. It’s a slight­ly goofy con­ceit for our era of impend­ing envi­ron­men­tal cat­a­stro­phe, in which Nor­we­gian sci­en­tists dis­cov­er a way of shrink­ing humans to pock­et size so they’re rather less of a drain on the planet’s dwin­dling resources.

A decade or so lat­er, in Payne and reg­u­lar co-writer Jim Taylor’s extend­ed time­line, the process has become a com­mer­cial real­i­ty for an increas­ing num­ber of Amer­i­cans who’ve decid­ed down­siz­ing is the way to go. Sav­ing the plan­et isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly their prime con­sid­er­a­tion how­ev­er, since for hard work­ing, finan­cial­ly over-extend­ed mid­dle income types like Matt Damon and his wife Kris­ten Wiig, the attrac­tion is clear. When you’re five inch­es tall, your dol­lar buys you so much more.

First though, you have to take out all your fill­ings. Oth­er­wise things could get real messy when you shrink down but your den­tal work doesn’t. It’s a telling detail as the movie makes the whole reduc­tion pro­ce­dure bland­ly indus­tri­alised yet weird­ly unset­tling. It has a kind of daffy momen­tum, sus­tained as Damon set­tles into his tiny and irre­deemably naff new sur­round­ings. Which is where Payne wants to get to. Like so many time-hon­oured sci-fi fables, this future vision is very much about the here and now, with an essen­tial­ly chid­ing take on how our obses­sion with feath­er­ing our own nests has over­tak­en so many oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions, whether it’s our whole world’s uncer­tain prospects, or the rights of those who ser­vice our pros­per­i­ty to live decent lives themselves.

There are def­i­nite shades of It’s a Won­der­ful Life here too, when Damon’s every­man pro­tag­o­nist sud­den­ly finds him­self exposed to human nature at its worst, whether it’s Christoph Waltz’s slick wheel­er deal­er mak­ing a pack­et by shrink­ing down lux­u­ry goods for the nou­veaux mini-rich­es, or the grim sur­round­ings for down­sized His­pan­ic ser­vants and clean­ers. Where once we had sight-gags about over­sized ros­es and Saltine crack­ers, now we’re in some look­ing-glass ver­sion of Don­ald Trump’s Amer­i­ca – not exact­ly where the Sat­ur­day night movie crowd expect­ed to find themselves.

It’s a mazy, unex­pect­ed tra­jec­to­ry which zig-zags between farce and seri­ous­ness in a way that nev­er quite feels ful­ly con­trolled. What’s more, the por­tray­al of the plucky Viet­namese clean­er (played by ter­rif­ic Thai-born actress Hong Chau) who takes befud­dled Damon under her wing and helps him under­stand the val­ue of car­ing for oth­ers, will doubt­less prove deeply divi­sive – some sus­pect­ing that her pid­gin Eng­lish is being used for patro­n­is­ing com­ic effect, oth­ers see­ing this whole plot strand as mere lib­er­al smuggery.

To be fair to Payne, though, such an indi­vid­ual is unlike­ly to have a per­fect com­mand of a sec­ond lan­guage, and at least the plot pulls a reverse on the usu­al white-sav­iour angle. And while the movie is undoubt­ed­ly some­thing of a rag­bag, it is also good-heart­ed and endear­ing through­out, gen­uine­ly inven­tive, and com­mend­able for using the full dig­i­tal resources of con­tem­po­rary fan­ta­sy cin­e­ma not just to con­sole or par­cel out emp­ty CGI spec­ta­cle but also to throw a few urgent ques­tion marks in with our entertainment.