Directed by:
Alexander PayneCinematography:
Phedon PapamichaelComposer:
Rolfe KentCast:
Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Rolf Lassgård, Ingjerd Egeberg, Udo Kier, Søren Pilmark, Jason Sudeikis, Maribeth Monroe (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
When scientists find a way to shrink humans to five inches tall, Paul Safranek (Academy Award winner Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to ditch their stressed out lives in order to get small and live large in a luxurious downsized community. Filled with life-changing adventures and endless possibilities, Leisureland offers more than riches, as Paul discovers a whole new world and realizes that we are meant for something bigger. (iTunes)
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Reviews (13)
It is almost a sin to turn such an interesting material into a film so uninteresting, boring and without creativity. Matt Damon is going downhill, his quite possibly last good film was The Martian, he has disappointed twice this year and his upcoming film Oceans' 8 doesn't have much of a future. The first hour of the film was still passable and Christoph Waltz gave it quite an energy, but after the arrival of the annoying Vietnamese woman who got on my nerves like no character in a long time, the film degraded two notches and also absolutely deviated from the original concept – I felt I was watching a different film. 40%.
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I want to see this filmed by Wes Anderson! An engaging start takes the audience into an original film world
promising unique viewing experiences, but then the creators resort to resolving some interesting issues in a way I
didn’t really care for. It is not a case of wasted potential of an extraordinary film event, just a film event for a group
of viewers I don’t belong to. Christoph Waltz’s Dušan amused me. I hope he’ll be discovered by the Coen brothers in The Big
Lebowski type of comedy!
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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?
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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%.
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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.
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