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DOWNSIZING | FILM REVIEW
***
Dir: Alexander Payne
Starring: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Kristen Wiig
(15, 2hrs 15 mins)
Getting small has never had such a giant impact. Writer/director Alexander Payne goes very high concept after a series of excellent dramas in About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska, Election and The Descendants, with this fable about America and masculinity in microcosm.
Matt Damon plays put-upon occupational therapist Paul, trapped in a job he sucks at, with no money and living in the same house in which he was born. He craves adventure, a change, something else. He is an ineffectual half-dreamer, wanting something else but not entirely sure what it is. Revolutionary Norwegian technology offers a change, with people being shrunk down to five inches; they are smaller so consume less, with this tech being purported as being capable of saving an overpopulated planet.
Naturally this becomes a growth industry (geddit?) with many signing up to be deposited in miniature paradises like Leisure Land. Damon and partner Kristen Wiig sign up, but she bails at the last moment, leaving Damon more alone than ever in his new miniature world. He may be surrounded by opulence but is still rootless, unhappy. He tries to find comfort in the hedonism of playboy neighbor Christoph Waltz, but it rings hollow. Big world problems still encroach on the Lilliputian community: turns out that even being small will not allow you to escape your own failings.
Mankind soon finds a way to use the revolutionary technology for ill. Revolutionaries are shrunk, terrorists miniaturised, any dissenting voice are disposed of, size-wise. The glitter of Leisure Land also has a seamy unpleasant side, as poverty and the underclass are revealed to Damon by a sparky cleaner brilliantly played by Hong Chau, an amputee who protested in her home country and finds herself smaller against her will.
Part-comedy, part-dystopian sci-fi and part-sludgy human drama, Downsizing is an examination of America that is not as good as it could be. It becomes somewhat muddled and a little inert in its middle section, as Damon tries to find a purpose. The film has a very uneven tone moving from sight gag to mawkish sentiment to apocalyptic, all very swiftly. The film becomes an environmental treatise in its latter stages: man is messing up the planet, but when man is as ineffectual and easily led as Damon , it proves a little hard to sympathise. There are several films struggling to get out in Downsizing, none of them really succeeding, but the film remains interesting. It occasionally hits caustic satirical high notes, and Hong Chau is an endearing angel of mercy.
Words KEIRON SELF
Opens in cinemas Wed 24 Jan.