Review – Downsizing

At the beginning of 2016, it looked like it was going to be a good year for Matt Damon.  Yes, he had The Great Wall early on, but in prime Oscar season, Damon was starring in two movies, Suburbicon and Downsizing.  Suburbicon was written by Oscar winners the Coen Brothers and directed by George Clooney, who is a Hollywood favorite.  Downsizing was written and directed by two time Oscar winner Alexander Payne.  It was looking like this was going to be Damon’s year.

Now, fast forward twelve months and all of these movies have been released.  What if I told you that the best movie Matt Damon was in was actually The Great Wall?  Because that’s exactly the case.  Suburbicon was a piece of hot garbage and not we have Downsizing, an uneven, preachy cautionary tale about the environment.

Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) is working class man from Omaha who is down on his luck financially and is looking for a change in his boring life.  When a new experiment allows people to shrink down to only a couple centimeters, Paul decides to be a part of this experiment and shrink himself permanently and live the luxury life in a place called Leisureland.  Paul’s life is changed forever in his new, small world.

The direction of this movie is all over the place.  The film first starts off focusing on Paul and him wanting a restart on his life.  This aspect of the film was interesting.  Payne is great at writing flawed male characters, as seen in Sideways (2004) and The Descendants (2011), so I was really intrigued to see how this new world was going to change Paul and watch his journey through it.

But that’s not what we got.  Payne takes this midlife crises/coming of age story and turns it into an environmental love story and none of it works.  As soon as the movie starts to get interesting and Paul starts to do some changing, the world Paul knows begins to change once again and he has to decide how he wants to handle it, all while growing feelings for a fiery Vietnamese immigrant (Hong Chau).  The love story is really weak and is really unsettling when it begins to bloom because it comes out of nowhere.  The environmental story is beaten over our heads over and over again that it gets annoying and I didn’t buy into it.  Payne is usually better than this and makes really great human stories, but he failed on this one, as the point he was trying to make never fully came through.

The cast of this movie is incredible, yet everyone is incredibly bland.  Damon is lifeless, giving one of the weaker performances I have ever seen from him.  Christoph Waltz does what Christoph Waltz does by being a charming and articulate man who seems to know what to say at all times.  Jason Sudeikis is in the movie for a brief moment and then vanishes, and Kristen Wiig is hardly in it, though she does look awesome with one eyebrow.

The only saving grace of the movie is Chau as Ngoc Lan Tran, an immigrant who broke into Leisureland via a television box.  She is hilarious, strong, and honest.  She has scenes that will make you laugh until your stomach hurts and scenes that will crush your soul.  It is one of the breakout performances of the year.

Maybe I missed something, but Downsizing is a movie that completely misses the mark for me.  Alexander Payne came up with a cool idea that quickly vanishes into a message movie.  This, coupled with a wasted all-star cast, equates to one of the most underwhelming and disappointing movies of 2017.

Did you see Downsizing?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.