Stars: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristin Wiig
Director: Alexander Payne
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The latest from Alexander Payne centers once again on a middle-aged man Paul (Damon) living a life that he feels beneath him, but hasn't really put in the effort to try and improve his situation. This is also the plot of Election, Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska, and in all of these films the chief protagonist ends up gaining his esteem back by using a woman's vision of or dream for the world without really acknowledging he's basically taking from her, a fact Payne needs to work that out with himself at some point. Anyway, Paul happens to be in luck, as there is now a technology that essentially changes your size, moving you toward being about five inches tall and in the process you get to live like a king, as the cost-of-living is insanely small, and you basically can retire even with just several hundred thousand dollars. He and his wife Audrey (Wiig) decide to take this irreversible plunge, marketed initially as a way to stop the effects of climate change but mostly as an economic shortcut, but at the last minute, after Paul has already shrunk himself, Audrey pulls out and decides not to shrink herself, causing Paul to be stuck as a small man forever without his wife.
The film then follows Paul as he learns about this new world, and himself, mainly through the eyes of a lascivious playboy named Dusan (Waltz) and an overeager Vietnamese activist named Ngoc Lan (Chau) whose prosthetic leg he accidentally damages, basically becoming her surrogate leg in the process by helping her. We learn that she lives in abject squalor even in a shrunken state, trying to keep people who can't afford to stay alive in this smaller state in a state of happiness, and continuing to fight for the world even when she's less than a foot tall (she was shrunk against her will, a side effect of this process by a dictator abusing the technology). The film ends with a story that's been in the background of the picture (arctic methane emissions) rocketing to the forefront, as the creator of the shrunken technology realizes human beings will be extinct regardless of his shrinking actions, as the methane emissions are too great and people's willingness to change is too slow. As a result, they go deep underground, and Paul nearly joins them before deciding that he loves Ngoc Lan and decides his role is to fight for change in a doomed world, rather than contribute to an unknown future below ground.
If that sounds like a lot of plot for one 135-minute movie, it's because it is. Alexander Payne's movie is hardly short on good ideas. We have the cruelty of fate with Audrey abandoning Paul and our constant need to find purpose in a life that doesn't show an obvious one (Paul only realizing his future by copying someone else seems a bit of a cop out). There's the way that we show abject selfishness in that the only way people can be convinced to save the planet is by improving their own lot in life, or how humanity is still constantly wanting to subjugate others into the lesser, as is evidenced by how a technology that should provide more than enough for everyone still leaves a lower-income class and is dismissed by those who can't benefit from it. There's the question over whether or not it's better to be part of something grand or stay with what you have, even if it might not be helping the long-term in favor of the short-term. All of these are great questions, foundations for a movie. It's a pity that Downsizing never takes the time to have an actual perspective on any of them.
This is largely Payne's script's fault, though I'll get to Damon's role in it in a second. As soon as he's brought out a new idea he squashes it just as quickly. Look at how we don't follow, say, Audrey's life after she abandons Paul or even see the immediate followup of major events, instead letting large time jumps gloss over the fact that the script has no idea what to do with these major life events in the short-term. Every time a cool idea is brought forth, it is pushed to the background once again, given a short shift by either Ngoc Lan or Dusan when Paul wants to discuss, giving us little insight from Paul himself about what he thinks of all of this newness. Payne's essential problem here is that he's world-building without actually doing anything with the movie. This would potentially be forgivable if it was the first few episodes of a series or a movie with a planned sequel, but the ending is clearly finite, and so we're left with a lot of cool ideas where virtually nothing happened. Contrary to popular opinion (see also Interstellar which has many of the same problems though at least attempts a plot, unlike here), this makes a bad movie, which is what Downsizing is.
The central performances don't really help save the picture. Damon plays Paul as a blank slate, someone who seemingly has never had a concrete opinion in his life before he meets Dusan and Ngoc Lan, which kind of makes him pathetic, something that I don't think Damon's performance really gets. These other two characters are polar opposites in their ideals, but at least they have a perspective on the world, and are quite frankly contributing something to the picture. I can't remember the last time I saw a drama so centered around an Oscar-winner that had such little insight into him as a person, which shows that I don't think Damon really got this script or assumed his movie star status would make up for his lack of character in Paul. It's easy to rag on Damon these days considering his foot-in-mouth public comments, but he is more than capable of giving a strong performance onscreen, even recently (he's very good in The Martian). This, though, is the worst I can remember seeing him onscreen.
The rest of the cast doesn't save the film either. Waltz has become insufferable with his Inglourious Basterds routine, a film that he deserved that Oscar for, but it's hard to remember that when he is so mind-numbingly smarmy in every role since. Wiig cannot find any humanity in her admittedly unlikable character, and Payne loses interest in her when she stops being a plot point, so she doesn't have time to redeem herself (couldn't we have at least had Paul confront Audrey at the divorce proceeding so we get some sense of where her life went?). The one actor who is getting plaudits is admittedly the best one; Chau has the showiest role, and has all of the film's best moments. However, even she plays her character so surface-level it's hard to understand if there's much that she hides from the world, and I'll admit that sometimes it felt a little bit like Payne's script was poking fun at her cultural differences from Paul more than with her, as was evidenced by my largely white, straight, and male audience at the showing I went to laughing at lines that I don't think were supposed to be perceived as funny. All-in-all, the fact that she's getting Oscar talk is cool (it's really a crime that Asian actors don't get better roles/attention in Hollywood), but this isn't close to one of the five best performances of the year. It's a broad role that should have at least some specificity, and well, it doesn't.
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