Downsizing

I like Alexander Payne's work very much and so far he has never disappointed me, but this one was a misstep. The basic premise is fine, I get what he wanted to convey to the audience, at the beginning it's full of interesting scenes and ideas, but in the last act it completely falls apart under the director's hands, when you get the feeling that Payne is either taking a solid piss at you or showing a loss of judgement. The only thing missing was Monty Python in a hug with Ashtar Sheran, I guess that's how unintentionally self-parodic it made me feel. It’s just a mess, what can I tell you? (04/11/2018)

I had a little trouble with Alexander Payne every time. The main characters of his stories are always looking for the meaning of life, their salvation, or a new goal, and usually go in endless circles while I often shake my head at how their situation somehow resolves itself. Downsizing is a shock to me for that reason. The main character actively tries to solve his unhappy situation each time, helps others (often by accident or unwillingly), and is constantly moving forward in peculiar directions. In addition, the topics that Payne and Jim Taylor stitched together are such a mess that I could hardly keep up with the necessary moods and settings. Ecology, marriage crises, migration, overpopulation, sci-fi tangents, harmony with nature, the wealthy, loneliness, dead ends of the future. And each time with an abundance of details. This story has everything, and its conflicting reception clearly shows that maybe there is too much for the audience. However, thanks to the presence of about ten familiar favorite faces in the smallest roles, I consider myself one of the most satisfied. (01/11/2018)

It's just so tricky to do these movies as pure social metaphor, because it’s terribly appealing to fall into simple, totally bitter theses. At least Lanthimos regularly churns these types of movies out with absurdity, comfortless visuals, and regular shrapnel erupting out of otherwise slow pacing and postmodern form. Instead, Payne has no distinctive formal method, and so he just kind of opportunistically flails around in it, at one point wanting to move us on a humane level or get us to empathize with his characters, then switching them whenever it suits him into simple caricatures that manage to redefine themselves abruptly in the span of a single sentence. Thus, in Downsizing, we find scenes straight out of South Park (the explosion of the vault entrance, Matt Damon suddenly drumming in hippie rags at sunset), scenes that look like the result of a movie fan party (a trashed Matt Damon partying with Christopher Waltz and Udo Kier), and scenes that are long enough and sensitive enough that someone might actually realize they're supposed to be sobbing and shaking their head with a wistful grin at the power of love, even in the most unlikely moments. And my nerve centers in my brain are simply no longer flexible enough to switch between all these modes so quickly and randomly. (01/16/2018)

A cute positive drama and a freshly startling conceptualization of a seemingly spectacular sci-fi subject devoted to a completely common man (as if Matt Damon is slowly taking over from Tom Hanks) and his completely ordinary worries. Alexander Payne wrote and filmed it his way, the trailers hardly divulged everything, so there is no lack of surprises, the humor is very enjoyable, Rolfe Kent's music is addictive and Christoph Waltz is totally great. If something was missing for me, then it was that Laura Dern had only a small role... But then again, she was there for a while at least. (01/24/2018)

A grey movie with a great idea (shrinking people) that actually ended up being something secondary. You can tell a story like that even in a normally large setting. It will be colorless the same way. A classic about how an internally dissatisfied man comes to happiness, all it takes is for his wife to kick him in the ass and for him to find an Eastern European friend... 50%. (04/28/2020)