★★★★☆
The movies of Alexander Payne are purpose-built for cynics. The 56-year-old writer-director and two-time Oscar-winner (for Sideways and The Descendants) delights in depicting central characters pushed to the brink of madness by the withering ignorance of those around them (think of the greedy cousins in The Descendants or the uncouth in-laws in About Schmidt).
His heroes, too, are often explicitly undone by their hubris (usually expressed as snicker-inducing vanity or bullish self-regard) and see the light only in a last-minute catharsis (the About Schmidt lead Jack Nicholson had to wait until the very last scene for his). Payne’s films, in other words, are a blast. They’re great fun. But always at a price. They pillory everyone on screen, and they seem to express a giddy, misanthropic worldview in which idiocy reigns and where the smartest guy in the room is actually the one behind the camera. They can be strangely self-serving and in their barbs and satirical set-ups they frequently say nothing more than: “People are awful and Alexander Payne is clever.”
Not any more. For although Payne’s latest offering, Downsizing, nods towards his favourite trope (everyone, including the leading man, Matt Damon, is basically a moron), it’s also a film of immense compassion and kindness. It is a sci-fi comedy that purports to be about environmentalism and the end of the American consumer dream, but is actually about something much more intimate and expansive.
“I mean, really, who am I?” asks Damon’s luckless middle-aged protagonist, Paul Safranek, with tears in his eyes, late into the film (Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the meaning of life? are all unashamedly on the film’s agenda). Safranek is another of Payne’s sympathetic middle-aged schmucks (George Clooney in The Descendants, Paul Giamatti in Sideways), certainly the most rounded yet, and carries the writer-director’s most elaborate and, occasionally, epic narrative vision.
Safranek, an Omaha-based occupational therapist, has been shrunk by science. He’s 5in high. When we first meet him, full-sized, he is struggling with mortgage repayments and failing to answer the material demands of a modern American lifestyle, including those of his ostensibly kindly yet quietly demanding wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). Enter the Norwegian environmentalist and boffin Dr Jorgen Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard) with his patented “shrinking” technology and a plan to reduce the size of the human race’s carbon footprint by literally reducing the size of the human race.
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Asbjornsen’s invention, handily enough, also means that our cash-strapped couple can relocate to a luxurious “miniature community” in New Mexico and live like millionaires, surrounded by fellow tiny millionaires, in tiny, gaudy McMansions (basically, millionaire Barbie). There’s just one catch — the shrinking is irreversible.
It is to Payne’s credit and to that of his innately compelling leading man (Damon is exceptional at “normal”) that the film’s ridiculous conceit is executed with such conviction and aplomb. Without relying on groundbreaking effects work or eye-gouging CGI set pieces (the miniature sequences could be straight from the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man), Payne uses complex characters and pointed social satire to layer this utterly bizarre fantasy with credibility.
An enormous chunk of the film is devoted to revealing how quickly the miniature rich, white communities have acquired an ethnic underclass of miniature blue-collar workers to service their every need, while some of the biggest laughs come from laser-guided attacks on the so-called keynote culture, popularised in recent years by Silicon Valley titans. Neil Patrick Harris drives the point home as a corporate salesman, on stage with fake bonhomie and a wireless mike, pushing high-tech innovations that will improves lives radically, until they don’t.
It’s not just point-scoring and chin-stroking either. There are lovely moments of broad comedy too. A pivotal sequence at an enormous human shrinkage facility has distinct echoes of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. It also features a wicked visual gag at the expense of Damon’s ego. The actor, as the newly shrunk Safranek, appears to deliver his first full-frontal nude shot — it’s hard to tell, he’s so tiny — and his manhood is, in the most literal way possible, microscopic. Elsewhere a mid-point appearance of Christoph Waltz playing a Serbian mobster gives a welcome jolt of adrenaline.
Best of all is the final act. Global disaster looms, a trip to Norway beckons and Payne’s fearlessness as a storyteller shines. As does his essential compassion. Beneath the satirical invention, the muted misanthropy and the crackpot narrative chicanery, the central message of Downsizing emerges in the emotional education of Damon’s downtrodden antihero. And what does it say? Be kind. Naturally.
15, 135min