Movie Reaction: Downsizing

Formula: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World / 5000

There's a point late in Downsizing when Matt Damon's Paul is in Norway, faced with his second huge, life-altering decision of the movie. He starts listing off to someone a long, crazy list of all the unlikely things that have had to happen to get him to this place, at this moment, with these exact people. My first thought when he was done was, "You missed a few."

I'm not going to dance around this at all. I did not like Downsizing. I was counting down the minutes for this movie to end. While there are many more incompetent movies I've seen this year, I'm not sure there have been any I was so ready to get to the end of. I couldn't believe it was only 2h 15m. It felt much longer.

Let me back up. Downsizing is a social satire from Alexander Payne about a world in which people can shrink themselves through a process called downsizing. The idea is, smaller people, smaller waste. It's originally discovered and perfected as a humanitarian effort to combat overpopulation. Pretty quickly, people realize it is also a cheap way for middle-class people to live like kings. That's what makes Paul and Audrey Safranek (Damon and Kristen Wiig) interested in the idea. They decide to go through the shrinking procedure to take their fortune to the shrunken community of Leisure Land. When that doesn't go according to plan, Paul finds himself downsized but back in a middle-class life before he's pulled into an adventure with a Vietnamese protester (Hgoc Lan Tran) and an opportunist (Christoph Waltz) who has become even more wealthy than normal after downsizing. As I pointed out in that first paragraph, it's a story filled with chance meetings, lucky breaks, and perfect timing. Any one of these things would be enough for the One Big Leap I'm willing to give any movie, and that's assuming that goodwill wasn't already spent on the downsizing idea to begin with. Altogether, it's hard for me to look at the story as anything other than a mess. And sure, the screenplay, through Damon, twice points out that it's aware of this mess, but he should've been saying "this is crazy" way before either of those moment for me to buy into it. Even if I forgive all that coincidence, it ultimately is for nothing. There's no reason the story has to jump through so many hoops to make the point it makes by the end, and there's little gained by making that point in such an extreme circumstance. It's all one big mess.

This would be a good time to point out that the difference between a messy movie and a movie being a mess is largely in the eye of the beholder. When a movie isn't tightly structured, it's a judgment call to determine if the pointless diversions and inexact plotting bother you. At the top of my head, Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is a messy movie that I happen to love that I could easily see someone else thinking its story is too cute by half. I developed my One Big Leap test to help figure out what my limit is and if I'm being fair to a movie. Another test may work better for someone else. I see a lot of what this film is doing. Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor are too smart for me to believe anything in the script isn't intentional or thought out. They are making a point about what makes life worth living and what really matters in the end. Damon faces huge decisions in the movie twice, toward the beginning and the end, to show if he's learned anything. There are movies I'm too dumb for. I readily admit that. I really don't think this is one of them.

I'll give Payne and company credit. They do a really good job creating this world. Throughout the film, it's clear that careful consideration when into how everything works in this world where people can shrink themselves. What would a shrinking procedure involve? How would it look once its normalized? What products do and don't need to be changed? As an example of world-building, I give it a solid A-. I just wish they didn't feel the need to show off how much they thought things through. Part of the reason the movie is so long (or felt so long) is that it needs to highlight all the things they've thought through. So much of it feels like Payne and Taylor are looking for someone to pat themselves on the back for being so clever. There's a scene in the bar where a guy goes on a rant about how downsized people shouldn't get full voting rights because they are so small and have less physical impact. That's an interesting thought, but it has nothing to do with anything else in the movie. The movie has many unneeded detours like that. Good world-building explains everything to the audience. Great world-building is confident to let it happen in the background. It has all the answers ready if they are needed, but it only shows what's needed for the story. That's where Downsizing falls short.

I didn't even care for the performances much. Matt Damon plays an everyman: a very dull everyman. Paul is just boring. He seems to think he's making the decisions in his life, but he's really just going along for the ride. Even his big moment, when he finally does the "right thing" manages also to be the least risky decision he's made. There's nothing wrong with having a character be an observer. Damon doesn't do anything interesting with it as a performer though. I've liked Hong Chau since I saw her on the show A to Z. I think she's giving a helluva performance in Downsizing, but I felt icky watching it. There were several points during the movie in my theater when several people in the audience were laughing at her. I couldn't tell if they were laughing because what she was saying was funny or because she was saying it with very broken English. That's when I realized I wasn't even sure what the film's intent was. IO got the sense that the movie was looking down on the character, which felt really wrong. Perhaps I'm reading too much into that, but it was very uncomfortable. Christoph Waltz is just playing Christoph Waltz. It felt like his character was at odds with the message of the rest of the movie. Then again, I'd have to think the movie had a consistent message to be sure. Really, the rest of the actors and actresses you'd recognize aren't around all that much, so I can't say what I thought of their performances.

I'm just going to stop here. I don't like piling on about a movie I didn't like. I'm amazed any movie is ever able to come together, even a bad one, considering how many different people have to work together to see a vision through to the end. It's no fun pointing out everything that didn't work. I do think Downsizing is exactly the movie that everyone involved intended to make. I just happened to like little about it. I hope I've covered why well enough. If you ask me, I say don't bother with Downsizing.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend