Like Woody Allen, Alexander Payne is going to be a filmmaker that I will never love like the world does. While others praised Nebraska as a modern classic, I kept wondering what exactly they were watching. Downsizing, however, finds me in agreement with the world around me. It seems Payne had a killer idea that he failed to execute effectively, leaving you frustrated at what might have been with this premise.
Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) is a Midwesterner in a rut. His life has not gone as he wanted, and he feels like he’s just drifting through life wishing he became a doctor. That all changes with the opportunity to be downsized e.g. shrunk down to 12 inches tall. The change is permanent, but you get big tax breaks because your consumption decreases exponentially, and your money exchange rate is crazy good. So Safranek and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) agree to go through with it…at the start. After the procedure, Paul goes to parties with neighbor Dusan (Christoph Waltz) and contemplates who he is at 1 foot tall, helped by an introduction to a Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau).
Downsizing’s premise is terrific. Probably too terrific for a feature film. The story could go in a myriad of directions the story introduces that a TV show might cover better. In the first 30 minutes, we get introductions to government involvement in the process, lifestyle changes as a result of downsizing, and how to find service workers for these new villages. These threads of the story kept me interested through the very end, hoping Downsizing would weave into something special like the movie Contagion.
However, Downsizing falls into a storytelling hole like The Discovery. Don’t remember that Netflix “gem?” It was where someone discovered the afterlife exists, but the story was about one woman questioning the premise and the story reinforcing it, while we we’re all wondering? Wait, what about this issue, or that government, etc? Downsizing’s story hopes Matt Damon is a blank enough slate that he is our representative in this world so we can feel like we’re a part of it; however, his character sucks. He whines a bunch and isn’t very interesting. The story tries to inject some life with Ngoc Lan Tran, but her accent come VERY close to being horribly offensive since we’re supposed to be laughing at her for a good chunk of time. Thankfully, third act changes to the story keep Downsizing afloat, but Damon is still at the center, leaving the most interesting aspects of this story as loose threads I hope a TV network picks up the rights to.
Welcome to my world critics. Now you start to see what I see when I watch Alexander Payne. Downsizing is of a piece with the guy, an interesting but very flawed director who directs Midwesterners in a way that makes coastal viewers think this is how we really are, but in fact is a simplistic stereotype. Alexander, please sell the rights of this concept to Steven Soderbergh so he can show you how this type of premise is done, please? Thanks a bunch. PS. I’ll give you mad props for showing everyone how amazing Norway looks…