Downsizing, Venice Film Festival review: Alexander Payne’s little big film

Alexander Payne, 135 mins, starring: Matt Damon, Christop Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig

Alexander Payne’s ingenious new feature Downsizing, which opened Venice Film Festival, is a little big film. It’s a Tom Thumb-style yarn that plays for laughs even as it deals with such hefty matters as climate change, overpopulation and looming environmental catastrophe.

The film has the same caustic, deadpan humour found in the director’s earlier features such as Election and Sideways but there is also a portentousness here that you don’t expect to find in his work. Many of its protagonists may be only a few inches tall but the film itself is on a far bigger scale than anything Payne has done before. For all his boldness and ingenuity, he sometimes struggles to reconcile the Swiftian satire with the sermonising.

The film begins in delightful and surprising fashion. Norwegian scientists come up with a means of “reducing organic material at a cellular level”. That’s to say, they work out how to shrink people. Their ambition is to build “a self-sustaining community of the small”. If humans are reduced to the size of insects, they consume far less of the world’s resources.

Their money goes a lot further. In America, this is an excuse for greed and consumption. In the gated, walled-in communities in which the little people live, $150,000 is worth the equivalent of $12m. For those who undergo the treatment, it’s an alluring proposition. By “downsizing”, not only are they helping to save the planet – they’re giving themselves the chance to live in extreme luxury.

Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are a middle-class couple from Omaha, Nebraska, struggling to make ends meet. Paul dreamed of being a surgeon but has ended up as an occupational therapist. He has only just paid back his student loans and can barely afford a mortgage on a new home. That’s why he and Audrey agree to think small.

Payne goes to extreme lengths to make the “downsizing” treatment seem realistic. There are armies of doctors and nurses who prepare clients for their new lives – shaving them, removing any cosmetic implants or gold teeth and then putting them in a vast anti-chamber in which the shrinking is done.

Life as a little person in luxurious “Leisureland” isn’t as idyllic as Paul had envisaged. He ends up working in a call centre and getting very bored. It’s at this point that Payne peps up the film by introducing us to Paul’s Balkan neighbour, Dusan (a bravura turn from Christoph Waltz), a hedonistic and cynical smuggler.

Venerable European art house actor Udo Kier plays Dusan’s best friend, the equally louche Joris. They have both realised that vodka, cigars and drugs brought in from the outside world will go a very long way indeed when consumers are so tiny.

Payne appears to be taking a few swipes at Trump’s America as he portrays the underclass in “Leisureland”, bussed in to tend to the rich folks’ homes but living in a huge shanty town beyond the wall.

The choice of heroine here is original. Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau) is a motor-mouthed, one-legged Vietnamese political protester who was imprisoned and then shrunk by the authorities to get rid of her. She is now working as Dusan’s cleaner, and her abrasive manner jolts Paul out of his apathy. He admires her, pities her and feels romantically drawn to her.

Matt Damon gives a thoroughly engaging performance as the middle-American everyman, a “nice guy” but “a little pathetic” as Dusan describes him. His bland demeanour makes him the perfect foil for the very fiery (and very funny) Hong Chau.

At first they have a great comic rapport. Late on, as the main characters all head to the Norwegian fjords, the film becomes strangely earnest and self-conscious. It takes on a mystical aspect. Payne’s powers of ironic observation seem to desert him and the storytelling loses its edge.

What can’t be denied, though, is the originality of the premise or the sheer verve with which Payne creates his modern-day Lilliput.

Downsizing had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and is now in cinemas.