Warning: It’s not a comedy!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, movie fans!
Downsizing (Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig) – If I told you this holiday season offers a big-budget, star-laden, special effects-heavy film that explores the global issues of over-population, climate change and poverty my guess is that you wouldn’t put it near the top of your Christmas movie list. On the other hand, if I told you there was a big-budget, star-laden, special effects-heavy comedy romp about people being shrunk and moving into an idyllic community where everyone is a millionaire, where would you put it on your holiday list?
Well, make no mistake; Downsizing is the former not the latter. Paramount Studio knows this, too, so they have been promoting the film as the latter. Don’t be fooled! Only about 1/3rd of this 2 hour 15 minute film resembles a comedy.
Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig’s’ Paul and Audrey Safranek are a happily married couple from Omaha who are cash-strapped. He is an occupational therapist for Omaha Steaks; we don’t know what she does. But both are intrigued by the new, totally safe technology that shrinks people down to five inches and allows them to live in their own little upscale communities with lots of amenities. Their $100,000 of net worth translates into $12 million in Leisure World. When Audrey changes her mind after Paul undergoes the irreversible change, he finds himself alone in a strange new world.
Exit Kristen Wiig; enter Christoph Waltz as Dusan Mirkovic, Paul’s neighbor sees nothing but fun and profit in this new little world. Act II is all about Paul’s adaptation to the new world, how he meets a Vietnamese activist-turned-cleaning lady (Hong Chau as Ngoc Lan Tran), and discovers that Leisure World isn’t all glamour and fun.
Act III takes Paul, Dusan, Ngoc and some other superfluous character to Norway where the shrinking technology was invented. There, we meet the shrunken inventor/scientist, his wife, and the original volunteers who pioneered the technology. Amidst the beautiful fiords and glorious sunsets there is sadness because the real news media tell us that methane gas is breaking through the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica. Both the old world and the little new world won’t last long.
Paul, whose life was small and inconsequential back in Omaha, now has to decide whether to become the next pioneer or return with Ngoc and Dusan to Leisure World.
Downsizing is the latest project from Director/writer Alexander Payne who brought us About Schmidt, Election and Sideways, three exceptional films. Downsizing is not as good but it is thought provoking. That’s great. But it is just not fair to suck the audience into what they think is a comedy. If you’re looking for that scene where the little people drain an Absolute bottle into a bucket – never makes it into the film!
The good news is that the special effects are, indeed, special. There are four pages of CG artists, animators, compositors, etc. The photography and visual effects are fabulous. The acting is just fine with Damon leading the way. The always-wonderful Waltz is generally wasted however. Thai-born Hong Chau almost steals the film. She uses an odd, stereotypical broken English even though she was raised by her Vietnamese parents in New Orleans, graduated from Boston University, and has no accent whatsoever. Incidentally, she uses the “f” word more times than a cop in a Martin Scorsese film so, parents, you might not want to take the kids.
From my perspective, you can wait to see Downsizing on video. I wish I had.