DOWNSIZING SPEC D: Alexander Payne. US. 135 min. Sep 11, 6 pm, Elgin Sep 12, 11:30 am, Elgin Sep 13, 6 pm, Princess of Wales Sep 16, noon, Roy Thomson Hall. Rating: NNN
After a string of modestly scaled character studies – About Schmidt, The Descendants, Nebraska – Payne swings for the fences with this satirical SF comedy. It’s risky and ambitious, and a commendable effort. It just doesn’t get all the way home.
Matt Damon and Kirsten Wiig are a struggling Omaha couple who plan to take advantage of a revolutionary process that shrinks people to about five inches tall, the better to live like royalty on private estates while conserving resources. And almost immediately, that plan goes sideways.
The midsection of Downsizing is something quite wonderful, as Damon’s well-meaning Paul navigates his way through a New Mexico community of “smalls” while deep in a mid-life crisis. The miniaturization gimmick is simply accepted the smartest thing Payne does is shoot everything normally, letting the characters’ reduced proportions peek through every now and then. And as Paul’s social circle grows to include a few new faces – most importantly the wonderful Christoph Waltz as a decadent upstairs neighbour and Hong Chau as a Vietnamese refugee who works as a house cleaner – his tiny world expands as well.
But once Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor have established their characters, Downsizing hits a speed bump, turning first into a fairly flat allegory for the American dream and then into a different sort of story entirely, leaving America behind for something stranger and darker. Paul is presented as a white saviour, which is kind of awkward – Damon did this in Elysium, and it didn’t work out well for anyone – and then a spectator, which mirrors the audience’s position in the final movement.
At two and a quarter hours, you can feel the parts starting to wear down, as though Payne and Taylor kept writing, convinced they’d eventually figure out an ending, What they settled on feels awfully, well, small.
