“Downsizing” is a film too big for its small central concept. What would have made a standout short film or an entertaining episode of Black Mirror is instead stretched to a feature over two hours in length, and as it briskly marches along, it inevitably runs out of things to talk about. In Alexander Payne’s late 2017 film, as a solution to overpopulation, Norwegian scientists figure out how to shrink people to five inches tall, allowing them to live luxuriously in extravagant dollhouses for a fraction of the resources and the money that they would otherwise use as full-size people. Paul (Matt Damon) is a suburban everyman who decides to “downsize” to escape his unsatisfying life but whose wife (Kristen Wiig) makes the last-minute decision not to follow him into his new toy-sized existence in the utopian “Leisureland.”
The premise is undeniably fascinating, and in the first act “Downsizing” makes good on its promise to display the quirky dichotomy between the real world and the miniaturized one. Paul climbs a room-sized divorce paper to sign his name, awkwardly carries a single rose the size of his torso, and tows comparatively massive bottles of vodka behind a shrunken yacht. But the film quickly loses its sense of wonder at the world of the tiny, and as Paul comments that everything feels the same as the normal world, with only occasional reminders of his true size, we come to the painful realization that he’s right. With the exception of a somewhat out-of-place third act sequence, “Downsizing” seems to forget about its scale and quickly devolve into a competent, but entirely unremarkable, midlife crisis rom-com.
And judged purely as a rom-com, “Downsizing” comes off as both predictable and rough around the edges. Paul’s bland character, a dull middle-aged everyman who enjoys quiet evenings and inoffensive sweaters, gives Matt Damon little to chew on, and while Christoph Waltz and Rolf Lassgard are fun as Paul’s party-animal neighbors, at the end of the day they are as one-note as the protagonist.
The single stand-out performance comes from Hong Chau, who plays the Vietnamese activist Ngoc Lan Tran who eventually (and after almost an hour of heavy-handed romantic foreshadowing) becomes Paul’s love interest. She pushes through the script’s often cringe-worthy stereotypes to convey surprising depth through otherwise surface-level dialogue. She’s by far the highlight of “Downsizing,” simultaneously funny and heartfelt in a way that no other character ever comes close to matching.
Alexander Payne’s writing and direction are safe and uninteresting; most of the necessary quirkiness comes from the bouncing soundtrack, while any of the milquetoast jokes (“don’t be short with me” one woman yells at a frustrated Paul) rarely elicit any more than a small chuckle. The film’s tone sits in the comfortable standard rom-com space, never too light nor too somber — without high stakes or standout romance develops mostly dry scenes of menial, repetitive labor — and only hints at an inner depth or message that never actually reveals itself.
In an early scene, Paul visits his old school for a reunion in which his newly-downsized classmates become the life of the party. As he considers his own upcoming downsizing decision, he eyes a poster that reads “the door to happiness opens outwards.” Like “Downsizing,” itself, that poster appears to communicate some larger idea of optimism and happiness. But also like“Downsizing,” on closer examination it comes off rather like a pleasingly saccharine, but ultimately empty. “Downsizing” is by no means bad; it’s light, mindless entertainment that falls right at median quality for most modern films. But that, in itself, is a shame. It never captures the potential of its central idea, instead settling for being a competent rom-com that wouldn’t differ substantially from an otherwise-identical version of itself at normal size. There’s enough here to justify, perhaps, an hour-long production that cuts itself off before it overstays its welcome, but in its current form, “Downsizing” desperately needs to be cut down to size.
Contact Noah Howard at noah364 ‘at’ stanford.edu.