In the not too distant future: Paul (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) find it hard to make ends meet - at least if they want to maintain their middle class status. So they decide to have themselves shrunk to a few inches high (a relatively new and popular technology) and move into a community of little people where their little money's worth a lot. But during the downsizing process, Audrey freaks out and doesn't go through with it, leaving Paul alone in this new world of little people. For what seems like forever he suffers from his divorce - until he meets his neighbour Dusan (Christoph Waltz), a hedonist and smuggler with a heart of gold, and his closest ally Konrad (Udo Kier), whose yacht serves Dusan's purposes more than well. Through them, Paul also meets Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a fugitive from Vietnam who has been a media personality once but is a cleaning woman now who does humanitarian work on the side. She has lost a leg, and working on her artificial leg gives Paul, who has once been a phisiotherapist but is now relegated to work in a phone help center, meaning in life again. But then he fucks up her artificial leg and in turn she demands he does her work - not only cleaning but also feeding the poor and the like - and against all expectations he enjoys it. Then though Dusan and Konrad need Paul for a mission to Norway to the very first colony of downsized people (though it's never known why they need him) who live there like the Amish, and Lan Tran insists to come with them. On the journey, Paul and Lan Tran become lovers ... but once there it becomes clear that the first colony is a bit of an end-of-the-world cult who want to go underground to sit out the next big (man-made) natural disaster, ice age or whatever as a sort of Noah's Arc - and Paul wants to join while Lan Tran feels it makes more sense to help the humans now ...

The basic idea of Downsizing is really fantastic, and visually it's brought across just fine. The problem here is with the script that breaks down the concept in way too many parts that seem to exist independent from one another. The result is that many narrative threads are thus not resolved or even not allowed to reach any considerable potential. So just like it's lead actor Matt Damon, the film seems to be stumbling through its world a bit on the clueless side, not even sure which approach to take: It's satire, drama, soap opera, enviromental message movie, love story and whatnot all rolled into one. Besides the beautiful pictures, the acting's one of the high points of the movie (though Damon remains a bit too bland), even if most of the characters lack depth from the story side.

In all, that could have worked beautifully as a limited series on Netflix or somewhere, where each of the narrative threads could be a full episode, as a movie it just feels muddled - with sparks of greatness though!

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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