[rating=4.00]
First the bad news. It finally happened. Alexander Payne’s streak is at an end—he finally made a bad movie. That’s disappointing, sure, especially for a director who’s had the kind of run he’s had. Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska is an incredible run of films, and everyone makes a dud from time to time.
The good news is that, if Downsizing is any indication, Payne’s bad movies are still fairly intriguing. Downsizing’s badness comes not from incompetence but from overextension. His dropping this ball shouldn’t be seen as a lack of skill; rather, this was a ball that feels almost destined to be dropped from the outset. It was a risk. He took it. He may not have succeeded, but it’s nice to know that Payne is the kind of filmmaker whose failures are, if nothing else, just as intriguing as his successes.
It’s hard to maintain momentum in a movie with as heady a premise as Downsizing; equally hard is sticking the landing, which is a must for movies with heady premises. Payne may have failed, but only just. That’s almost more frustrating than the fact that it wasn’t very good. It’s always painful when you can see a filmmaker’s desires through the mess they produced. There’s a great premise inside of Downsizing, but it ultimately collapses under the weight of its ambition.
Matt Damon plays Paul Safranek, a work-a-day schlub whose life is increasingly mired in existential angst. When a new technology is invented that can shrink humans down to ten centimeters—meant to begin to counter our negative impact on the planet and environment—Paul and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to take the plunge and go small. Despite the fact that their meager savings translates to huge money in tiny people terms, Audrey gets cold feet and leaves an already shrunk Paul whose life now has less meaning than it did before. When he meets a Vietnamese activist, Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau) who was shrunk against her wishes by an oppressive regime, Paul begins to learn what’s important in life.
Downsizing’s main problem is that Payne doesn’t know what to do with his premise once he’s pulled it off. While the first act is filled with wry wit that propels the film forward, the momentum comes to a screeching halt once Paul is downsized, breaking the promises made by the film’s opening. Gone are the references that might make us remember that Paul and his friends are living in a tinier world than the one we are now. One or two images aside, there’s really nothing that indicates that Paul is anything but a normal size (except for the constant verbal reminders that grow more and more wearisome as the film moves on).
It feels like the waste of a premise. Why go through the trouble of establishing this world when you’re not going to do anything with it besides craft yet another story about a boring white guy who’s bored of his boredom? The overall narrative is scantly affected by the promising conceit. Paul is the kind of boring guy who’d still be boring no matter what size he was. Absent any purpose for his shrinking, it would seem Payne just crafted a heady plot device to hide the fact that nothing really separates Downsizing from the scores of films who often try to make boring, aging white guys something more interesting than they are.
Even the film’s messaging, which I agree with in principle, comes off as overly preachy and banal. “Waste and excess BAD; love and sustainability GOOD.” It’s been well over a week since I screened the film, and my head still hurts from how hard I rolled my eyes. It’s the kind of reductive that will win exactly zero hearts and minds, and is presented so laughingly poorly that it might actually damage the causes it purports to forward.
Still, for all its faults, it’s nice to see a film that dares to be different, and even better to see a filmmaker like Payne try something a tad beyond his typical flavor. Downsizing isn’t a wholly awful movie, just an exceedingly pointless one that can’t sustain its own desires. It’s a failure, sure, but not a total one. In the world of cinema, it’s better to watch something that aimed high and fell short than something that didn’t even try. While Downsizing might be the worst of Payne’s oeuvre, Payne at his worst is still better than a lot of filmmakers at their best. Perhaps now that he’s stretched his legs a little bit, his next effort will stand on more solid ground.
Downsizing is now playing in theaters everywhere.
