Downsizing

Downsizing (2017) is a silly science fiction film, notable for its direction by Alexander Payne.  Payne is a reliably interesting filmmaker, well-known for his early acerbic comedies (Citizen Ruth and Election) and a number of extremely successful adaptations from other sources -- including About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, and, more recently, The Holdovers.  He is from Omaha, Nebraska and his pictures are often set in that city..  Downsizing, a highly ambitious movie with an expensive cast, is the sort of failure that wrecks a director's career, and, in fact, casts doubts on some of the fundamental premises underlying his work -- the movie's deficiencies probably contributed to a partly successful attack on Payne mounted between 2018 and 2020 in which he was accused of statutory rape; prior to that contretemps, Payne was a renowned philanthropist, film festival jury member, and one of the few moviemakers accorded final cut privileges by the studios -- the rape claims, revolving around differing memories as to when a sexual encounter occurred, and the bad reviews for Downsizing, tarnished Payne's luster but now seem to be receding into the past.  Payne is not a particularly prolific film maker, for instance, not making any films during one seven year period in his life, and, so, it's hard to know to what extent scandal and disappointment over Downsizing actually affected his productivity.  Downsizing seems to have been made in 2020 before the Covid pandemic; The Holdovers may have been shot at the outset of the pandemic but was only released, after final editing, in 2023.  

Downsizing is interesting because it is an epic failure, a misstep on a grand level.  It's undoubtedly a bad film with embarrassingly bad writing -- almost every shot seems somehow false and meretricious:  for instance, an opening "eureka!" sequence in which a Norwegian scientist discovers how to "downsize" living creatures is filmed like a bad TV commercial and manages to be both trite and dull at the same time. Payne isn't a showy filmmaker -- he has a HBO sensibility, working efficiently, with good use of locations and excellent actors; but it's evident that he relies heavily on well-written scripts and, when the screenplay, is badly  conceived and weakly executed, there's nothing he can do to retrieve the picture but insert some spectacular landscapes in its last couple reels.  And, of course, as the pictures get prettier, the writing gets markedly worse.  

From the finished picture, it's not clear why Payne thought that a movie of this sort could be effective.  It's also clear that once he had embarked on the movie, the underlying premise proved too thin to support the picture and so the film takes some strange swerves, ostensibly into virtuous messaging, an ideological turn that is undercut by the movie's use of ethnic caricatures and stereotypes, imagery that is borderline offensive.  The initial target of the film is young urban professional pretensions and greed, often a theme in Payne's films.  A married couple, played by Matt Damon (Paul Safanek) and the insufferable Kristine Wig, are dissatisfied with their suburban life in Omaha -- Paul works as an occupational therapist employed doing "mostly paper work" at Omaha Steaks.  (There are some reasonably well-staged packing plant scenes; although the workers mostly seem to be middle class White men, Paul is shown speaking Spanish to an injured laborer.)  The couple  can't afford the house that they desire and their mortgage application has been turned down to due to Paul's student debts, an obstacle to prosperity only recently paid off.  At a class reunion, Paul and his wife encounter a couple who have been downsized -- that is medically reduced to five-inches in height, a diminution that makes it far cheaper for them to live in luxury in a doll-house mansion at Leisureland, a sort of retirement community for miniaturized people near Santa Fe.  The couple tout the benefits of their new life style -- downsizing is advertised as good for the planet's ecology but, also -- and this is the real appeal -- allows it's miniature proponents to live like Kings and Queens on incomes that are now vastly disproportionate to their material needs.  We learn that $162,000 in the miniature realm is equivalent to 12.6 million dollars.  The tiny humans travel for next to nothing in little glass boxes stacked in airplanes and can afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in diamonds and other luxury items for a pittance.  Accordingly, avarice, not a desire to reduce demand on the environment, motivates people of moderate means to be irreversibly shrunk into tiny animate mannequins.  (The premise seems unsound:  it would seem that the cost of devising miniature tools, cars, and artworks for these people would be significant -- it costs money to make things very small.)  Normal-sized human beings resent their miniature counterparts and, in fact, think that they are weakening the economy by withdrawing from it and that they shouldn't  be considered full-fledged voters -- maybe, each miniature citizen should get only a fraction of a vote.  With some trepidation, Paul and his wife pay to be miniaturized.  (The best parts of the picture involve preparations for the medical process shown in unflinching details -- heads have to be shaved to keep the miniature folks from suffocating in their own hair and teeth with fillings must be surgically removed, since prosthetics don't shrink; if you have a gold filling  in your teeth, the process will cause your head to explode.)  Paul gets reduced to five inches in height and, then, learns to his horror that his wife refused the process and, in fact, with her head shaved and one eyebrow missing, has flown back to Omaha.  A divorce ensues and Paul finds himself not only miniaturized but also poor.  He goes to work in a Lands End call center, peddling sweaters, and has to live in an apartment building and not the vast palatial mansion that he and his wife purchased in Leisureland, before be "downsized."  Paul's upstairs neighbor is played by the grinning and repulsive Christophe Waltz -- he acts the role of Dusan, a wild and crazy Serb, and the first of several marginally offensive stereotypes featured in the film.  Dusan is a sort of smuggler -- he acquires a single Cohiba cigar and parcels it out as 2000 miniaturized cigars, also importing luxury goods like caviar and diamonds.  Dusan hosts wild parties and has a sidekick played by the wonderful Udo Kier who epitomizes diminutive Euro-Trash (he owns a yacht that he has mailed by Fed Ex to destinations where he intents to sail.)  This colony of tiny international jetsetters are all depraved and Paul, partying with them, takes some kind of drug (Ecstasy, maybe) resulting in a '70's style psychedelic freak-out.  None of this is convincing and all of it is poorly written; we now seem to be in a totally different film.  As one might expect, downsizing has a dark side.  Armies of little people are required as workers at the luxury resorts where the downsized middle-class Americans are living -- so we have tiny Mexican and Filipino workers living in squalid enclaves just outside the city walls.  (Of course, Leisureland has to be isolated under a hermetically sealed dome to keep the little folks from predation by bugs and birds.)  A Vietnamese activist, a woman named Nduoc Lan, has been miniaturized by the Communist regime -- political opponents are routinely miniaturized to make them disappear -- and she narrowly escapes death in a "TV box", possibly a shipping crate in which 15 of the 16 illegal asylum-seekers die.  Nduoc has lost her foot due to infection and is now laboring as a house-cleaner.  When she comes to Dusan's bachelor pad to clean up the mess after one of his orgies, she meets Paul.  Paul notices her bad prosthetic foot and, rather ineptly, applies his occupational therapy skills to help her --he just ends up wrecking her prosthetic.  In this way, he learns of the communities of disenfranchised and impoverished laborers bussed in and out of Leisureland to do the cooking, cleaning, and provide other menial services.  (Nduoc Lan is another caricature who speaks in brusque, scarcely intelligible English and is supposed to embody immigrant pluck and enterprise.)  Things take another bizarre turn when, for reasons never explained, Dusan and his buddy played by Udo Kier, embark on a trip to Norway to meet the aging inventor of downsizing who lives in a commune, the world's first village for the medically reduced, in a spectacular sub-arctic fjord.  Nduoc Lan and Paul also accompany Dusan and his buddy to the fjord. Why they are allowed to make this trip is unclear.  Here things slip in Midsommar territory -- the Norwegian pygmies are members of benign cult and they are fanatical about the environment.  The Norwegians understand that climate change is irreversible and so they plan to descend into a subterranean vault and live there for 8000 years until the catastrophes wrought by the Anthropocene "stabilize".  By this point the inevitable has occurred and Paul is having sex with Nduoc -- several distasteful scenes involving lots of stump-caressing foreplay.  He has to decide whether to stay with her on the surface with the cynical Dusan, his buddy, and Nduoc or whether he should decamp into the vault.  The Norwegians bid farewell to the sun with much dancing and drumming as twilight descends upon the rocky immensities of the fjord.  Dusan has said that the tiny people will likely just murder one another in their cave within a generation or two and so he elects to remain on the surface -- "we have a couple hundred years remaining" he blithely notes.  Choosing love over ideology, Paul runs from the tunnel to the grotto, escaping just before the door is sealed forever.  With Nduoc, he returns to her squalid, if teeming and energetic, worker city where she continues her vocation of doing good deeds among the impoverished Spanish-speaking workers. 

The movie scrupulously denies viewers any of the pleasures one might expect from such a saga.  There are no fights with spiders or cats (as in The Incredible Shrinking Man), no sex scenes between Lilliputians and normal sized humans (as in Gullliver's Travels); when rain falls, we expect the drops of water, enormous to the five-inch humans, to smash the little people and flood their homes -- nothing of this sort happens. (In fact, the movie seems set up for a spectacular flood scene; the teeming worker tenements look like the subterranean apartment blocks in Fritz Lang's Metropolis and I kept expecting the virtuous Nduoc Lan to rescue the workers from some kind of watery calamity.)  The picture is very poorly written and there are some embarrassing speeches in its last act, including a cringe-inducing scene in which Nduoc differentiates between eight kinds of "fuck" and asks whether Paul's intercourse with her was a "pity-fuck" or a "love-fuck."  (Paul tells her it was a "love-fuck".)  Christophe Waltz' grotesquely stereotyped Serbian smuggler is amusing and brings some much-needed life to the picture but his part makes no real sense and its not clear exactly where the mobs of European super-models and Greek and Spanish playboys have come from -- they seem to be, I would venture, international friends of Alexander Payne.  (Payne is of Greek ethnicity -- "Payne" is anglicized from Papadoupolos; and he studied in Spain.)  But the movie is so poorly designed and badly written that it manages to force Udo Kier into a bad, even sentimental, performance.  The vast and impressive landscapes in the film's last sequences are evidence that the movie is in serious trouble, even, desperate straits -- the picture indulges in National Geographic-style grandiosity to cover its obvious defects.  (And in Norway, the scene in which the miniature cultists bid farewell to the sun  is also misconceived -- Payne doesn't seem to have heard of the "Midnight Sun" and the fact that it neve really gets dark in midsummer Norway, paticularly in the glacial Arctic fjords that the film depicts.)   The movie is a waste of time but so bad, I think, that it probably will act as a re-set button for Payne.  He has nowhere to go from this debacle but up.  (Jason Sudeikus, the SNL alumnus, is wasted in an underwritten buddy part; Kristine Wig, who is always annoying, is hapless here and awful.  The rest of the cast, including the Norwegians, are lifeless.)