Whenever I have a hard time to categorize a film in a certain genre, the reasons can be very good or very bad. Sometimes it’s one of those original and inventive films that escapes the patterns imposed by film critics. Other times the movie is so confusing or tries to please viewers in too many different categories, and then the resulting mix is again hard to describe. With ‘Downsizing‘, the 2017 film by director and co-writer Alexander Payne, I find myself somewhere between these two situations. The film has a rather original starting idea, but it is consistently supported only for the first half hour of the over two hours of viewing. What goes on is not entirely uninteresting but not as original, and then the weaknesses of the script cause ‘Downsizing‘ to fall apart in several directions (science fiction, utopia and social satire, ecological film, the end of the world or at least of the human species) which dilutes the effect of the whole. Unlike many of the viewers who gave notes on IMDB, I don’t think ‘Downsizing‘ is a failure, but it still achieves far too little of the promises of the beginning.
There is a solution to the problems of the planet! This is at least the theory proposed by the ‘Downsizing‘ script. The idea is to reduce the size of our body by about 25 times. We will consume much less, and the limited resources of our over-exploited planet will be considerably saved. The technical issues are solved in the first scenes of the film, and the prosaic details that burden other movies in which similar downsizing takes place – such as defending of insects the size of dinosaurs or what happens if a cat gets lost in the tiny paradises – are ignored or trivially expedited. Mankind in Alexander Payne‘s film engages on the path of shrinking, but the process for all of humanity will take centuries, during which time the areas where miniaturized people live seem to be parks of recreation and idealized heavens. The hero of the film, overwhelmed by the problems of daily existence, decides together with his wife to embark on the path of miniaturization. The road will be full of surprises, the small-scale society is not exactly like in commercials, as is the case with community real estate projects both in reality as in other films (the comparison with ‘Suburbicon‘ made in the same year, in which Matt Damon also plays the lead role is inevitable). And in the meantime, the world of the ‘big ones’ (97% of the population is still at full size) is in imminent danger of extinction.
I did not mind the technical discrepancies, the details of this kind being just a pretext, and I even liked that the temptations to slip into horror were avoided. The strong part of the film is, in my opinion, the way it deals with the social issues. The turmoil of the middle-class family that fails to overcome the threshold of material problems and the recognition in the miniaturized society of the same class differences and social problems as in the world of the ‘big ones’ is credible. I was less impressed by the ecological slope of the story in the second part of the film. The cast is diverse and interesting, but the presence of actors such as Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Udo Kier or Rolf Lassgård who combine comedy with sentimentality has left me in a dilemma about the authors’ attitude towards the messages about the survival of the planet, or perhaps towards the parodying of these messages. If the approach was serious, the result is a big miss. If the intention was satirical and parodic, then it is not funny enough. Matt Damon, on the other hand, proves again, in my opinion, that he left behind the ‘baby face’ roles and is building a solid career, with most diverse casting. Surprising from start, sprinkled with interesting ideas and a few good moments, ‘Downsizing‘ is worth watching despite the loss of focus in its second part.