Alexander Payne’s new film Downsizing evokes the spirit of Jonathan Swift, but leaves you exhausted instead of an elated face. Quite a rare feat for the gifted American filmmaker who gave life to many ordinary Americans with wit and irony.
Unlike his previous works, this one puts too many ideas in the churn, confusing the proceedings to finally reveal a result that is as dull as Paulo Coelho’s philosophy.
Downsizing begins with a staggering aspiration up its sleeve, introducing us to a concept in which mere mortals can shrink themselves to a height of about five inches, developed by a Norwegian scientist named Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen (Rolf Lassgård). It’s a one-stop solution for humans who by dropping themselves in size can reduce the amount of waste and pollution they create, paving way for a better climate condition. The idea quickly becomes a popular craze, because lesser-sized materialistic needs enable average income groups to lead large, luxurious lives as soon as they become pint-sized. Be small, live large, since size does matter.
Payne’s protagonist, another average American, Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to become the residents of Leisureland (a community for miniature people) after much deliberation. There are delightful details of the procedure that turns normal folks into little folks: body hair gets removed, teeth get extracted, and gastric irrigation inspected with critical clarity. Post the reduction manoeuvre, normal-sized attendants scoop up the naked tiny bodies with a spatula. When Paul wakes up in his new avatar, he checks his private parts to make sure all is not lost, before a jolt arrives in a phone call.
Post the shriveling business, the film lands another brilliant gag about Paul’s wedding ring.
This basic premise and the beginning, both so intriguing, your mouth starts watering at the possibilities Payne along with his frequent collaborator Jim Taylor intends to explore.
Alas, Downsizing starts morphing into diverse designs, from a social satire it balloons into a sci-fi fable of impending apocalypse, without ever caring for an ounce of wit or genteel empathy, Payne’s signature strength.
Downsizing is rife with ideas, but it introduces them to only leave it at that. For Paul’s neighbour Dusan (Christoph Waltz with his wicked laugh), downsizing is purely a business scam, making dough by splitting a smuggled Cuban cigar into thousand little pieces for the little people. Then there is Vietnamese activist Hong Chau (Ngoc Lan Tran in a dubious pidgin accent) who along with many others were forcibly downsized. Payne leaves such persuasive political ideas to the peripheries to chase a watery kindness which gradually becomes incompatible for the finishing line.
The blandness of Paul’s journey, the escalation of his white guilt drowns the movie in mundane message mode. The Lilliputian universe and the normal existence are hardly distinguishable, both carrying the same set of injustices and attitudes, and this lack of inventiveness in differentiation ultimately extinguishes the fire of this satire.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder).
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