Downsizing (2017)

Alexander Payne's Downsizing arrives with the grandest of ambitions: a satirical science fiction epic about overpopulation and the shrinking of the human body as a remedy for planetary collapse. The Norwegian scientist who invents the procedure frames it as an environmental fix, and the film returns often to the methane lurking beneath the Antarctic ice. This is a climate parable at heart, and it wears that heart on its sleeve. The tone, alas, wobbles between earnest wonder and weary resignation, never quite settling into either.

The story's real interest lies in Leisureland, a walled consumerist enclave for the newly small and newly rich, and in the slum just beyond its dome, where immigrant service workers sustain a luxury they cannot share. Paul Safranek, played with admirable blankness by Matt Damon, stumbles into this arrangement without ever having considered it. His guide is Ngoc Lan Tran, a Vietnamese activist downsized against her will, played by Hong Chau with a ferocity the film does not always deserve. Her presence gives the movie its sharpest portrait of exploitation, even as the screenplay keeps race at arm's length.

Ngoc Lan refuses the colonists' underground vault, insisting that the people who need help are those left above ground, and the film grants her that conviction without building a feminist argument around it. The closing act reaches for transcendence and settles for a shrug. Payne wants us to feel the weight of human purpose, but he delivers the lesson through drama and dry comedy, not sermons. The result is a film of large ideas and modest follow-through, sincere in its anxieties and uncertain about what to do with them. We are left with a small man, a broken prosthetic leg, and a dinner delivered to an old man. It is enough, barely, and no more than that.

This is a curious artifact: ambitious, humane, and largely forgotten, a movie that mistook its own premise for a thesis and never quite found the argument to match it. We classify it, we file it, and we move on to the next screening.

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