Downsizing: (Dir. Alexander Payne, 2h 15 m)

Downsizing is a film of two halves. The first is a socially astute, funny science fiction what-if story investigating the permanent miniaturisation of humans into tiny versions of themselves to save the world from overpopulation, from the initial discovery of the science to the initial test party and finally to many hundreds of thousands inhabiting many hundreds of miniaturised cities, borrowing visually  from everything from Mary Norton's The Borrowers to Honey, We Shrunk the Kids, whilst plotwise the film artfully moves through any one of a number of satirical science-fiction films in which a good idea slowly unravels over the length of the film to reveal that in fact, it causes more problems than it solves.

This half of the film is shot through with social satire, stunning effects, and well observed social satire. Beginning in Norway, with the discovery of the process by Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen, who later downsizes himself and a group of colleagues, the film then moves to down-on-his-luck nearly-man Paul Safranek (a surprisingly empathetic performance from Matt Damon, at least for this first half), and his wife, Audrey, who, stuck in a dead-end job, and unable to afford a better house, who, after a highschool reunion with two former classmates, who have become downsize-es, begin to consider the process as a possible solution to their money, housing and life-style issues. They sell their house, their posessions, and enter the downsizing process.
Throughout the entire first half of the film, there are things that could have been carried on into the second half of the film-there are hints of prejudice against those who have been downsized-at one point, a drunken patron yells at Paul and Audrey that the downsizees are lesser people, costing the economy more than they contribute, and that they should thus not receive a full vote.This is a fascinating idea; a suggestion that in downsizing, that people become less than a full person. Even inside "LeisureLand", the site that Paul eventually makes his home, there is a sense that downsizing has left the people who have been downsized somehow lesser people; this is a world devoid of nature, where things as simple as the weather and roses are lacking-it is an artificial, almost stepfordised world in which most of the people have infinite leisure, and thus become indolent and bored. Had these story threads continued, this would not be  a film of two halves.

Unfortunately, once Matt Damon gets downsized, with his wife having second thoughts and promptly disappearing from the plot, the film promptly begins wobbling as we enter the second half of the film, full of white saviour white-knighting, bizarrely shot drug-addled partying, miniature survivalists burying themselves into a mountain in Norway, and above all, characters that don't even seem to belong in the same movie as the first half. Chief among these is Christopher Waltz, playing Dušan, a Serbian (a detail that the film spends a good ten minutes trying to spit out, mostly because Waltz himself doesn't seem to know what accent he's actually doing.
Dušan is not necessarily a bad character-a smarter version of this film, that continued the feeling and tone of the first, could have been a far darker character, smuggling, as he does, alcohol and other vices into the various miniature worlds, bringing forbidden fruits that promptly bring as much damage, if not more, to the miniature world than the full-sized equivalent. Instead, he's an eccentric next door neighbour to Paul, holding wild parties, that are enjoyably hedonistic rather than deeply concerning, the oddly shot, and frankly bad-music-video trip that follows funny for all the wrong reasons.

However, the film's biggest mis-step is undoubtedly Ngoc Lan Tran, a miniaturised Vietnamese political dissident-this is not itself a bad concept-the idea of oppressive regimes using miniaturisation to deal with political opponents, or to reduce entire ethnic groups to a fraction of their size, presumably to be exterminated or moved away, is commented on in the first half. As for her disability and the fact that she, together with several tower-blocks worth of people have to live on the outside of the world, in a number of converted trailers, this could have been dealt with maturely and in an interesting way.
What we get is bad, Mickey Rooney, Breakfast at Tiffany's bad, broken English, a woman who floats between pathetic figure of pity for Paul and an overbearing stereotype of pushy Asians, who casually hints she may have offed her cancer-suffering room-mate, and who promptly attaches herself to Paul and, in essence, makes her work for him. The fact that this character seems at once to shrug off everything-her miniaturisation and escape in a television box, at the cost of the lives of her fellow escapees, and the loss of her leg could have made her a tragic yet brave figure. She is written offensively, lazily and in possibly the worst way possible for a a character of this type.

The film, having introduced us to Ngoc, developed what passes for chemistry between her and Paul, and promptly and irrecoverably jumped the shark. With Dušan, Paul, Ngoc and a hard-partying, globe trotting captain in tow heading to Norway, colossal bottles of Smirnoff in tow to the original colony that started the entire downsizing programme, including Dr. Jørgen, who announces that the world has reached a point of no return in terms of glacial melt, the world is going to end and that the only place to be safe is in the earth's crust, in a vault. Having decided to go into the vault, Paul promptly changes his mind, and returns to the surface, to continue helping Ngoc. It is...so bizarre, so left-field, and so...dumb that the film frankly gives up a few minutes later.

This is a film that promised so much, set itself up well, and yet loses itself so utterly. The two halves of the film are so disjointed, and the second half is so tonally deaf to what the film should and indeed could have been, that it fatally taints the rest of the film. An oddly shrunken mess of a film.

Rating: Neutral