Alexander Payne is a world-class writer-director, and in almost every film he’s made to date, he has focused on the quiet if quirky lives of the heartland folks he grew up around. The native Nebraskan can’t be accused of naively lionizing the American “middle,” even as he has consistently shown its denizens a great deal of genuine respect. His best to movie to date was 2013’s Nebraska, which followed a crotchety old coot (Bruce Dern) who falls prey to a sweepstakes swindle.
While Payne affords Dern’s character a high degree of dignity, he is not glorified. Neither does Payne romanticize widowed insurance agent Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) in 2002’s About Schmidt — Schmidt sends deeply personal letters to an impoverished African child, but there is nothing hokey or demeaning about the character’s basic need for human connection. Payne always manages to display a tender humanism, even as he criticizes the privilege of his blinkered protagonists.
So what explains Payne’s newest film, Downsizing, a sharp turn down a conceptual dead-end road and a forfeiture of virtually everything that has made Payne’s films unique up to now? Working with a broad visual premise that perhaps only Charlie Kaufman could have pulled off, Payne has certainly expanded his canvas. Where Nebraska or 2011’s Hawaii-set The Descendants relied on the modest wonder of expansive landscapes for their cinematic power, Downsizing is based almost entirely on the most basic gag there is. When people shrink, other people are really, really big. Disparity of scale: It’s the wackiest.
There’s a story, of course. In a timeframe that resembles our own, Norwegian scientists figure out how to reduce organic mass without killing it. So from an environmental standpoint, “getting small” is a way to radically reduce the human footprint and save the earth’s resources. But it’s also a boon for the struggling middle class, since tiny = cheap. Enter the Safraneks, Paul (Matt Damon) and Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who decide that they can live the high life while doing Mother Nature a good turn.
Downsizing spends a certain amount of time on the medical process, much in the same way Kaufman did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Bodies must be completely shaved, which makes you wonder about the shrunken dogs and horses we see in Tiny Town (actually called Leisure Land) later on. Were they similarly buzzed? In any case, all of this is merely a way station for an entirely different movie dealing with new friends Paul makes: a pair of European micro-importers (Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier) and a Vietnamese dissident who was downsized against her will (Hong Chau).
Once in Leisure Land, or just beyond its borders, Downsizing is really just another film about globalization and the haves and have-nots, and so there’s no question that Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor have their hearts in the right place. But by this time, they are committed to a gimmick that has outlived its usefulness. Downsizing’s eco-message and its consideration of those living in the shadow of the gluttonous West don’t require this nifty shrinkage motif, which doesn’t even serve as an allegory. The concept does allow Payne & Co. to construct all manner of funky sets and to show how wild it is when a wedding ring is half as tall as the man who once wore it.
Payne’s earlier films were (ironically enough) smaller, less ambitious affairs that asked us to spend time with the individuals left behind by modernization or the accelerated international economy. Even Sideways, a film about a wine snob, was ultimately about a middle-class striver whose tastes had outstripped his ambitions, a common symptom of the internet era. But Downsizing is practically an argument against itself. It exhibits all the trappings of a visionary work of cinema, but has no real vision, not of itself and not of the future it purports to critique.
Toward the film’s end, Damon’s character pauses for what seems like an eternity, pleased with himself for doing a good deed. Nothing could encapsulate Downsizing better than that.
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