“Downsizing”: Go get small
“Downsizing”, directed and written by Alexander Payne
(with Jim Taylor) seems like a modern telling of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s
Travels”, at least the Lilliputian part, with the same purpose, to poke fun at
the way our political systems neglect global problems.
Some time
soon a scientist in Norway discovers a way to “downsize” almost any organism by
a mass of about 2500:1 with a single injection and heat chamber treatment. Soon
companies are offering it to people with enough money, and
setting aside “model train” communities around the world, somewhat hidden or
perhaps “Under the Dome”, or perhaps like The Truman Show. It’s a way to save
the planet from overpopulation (although the film doesn’t mention the whole
problem of “the right babies” going along with population demographics).
Matt Damon plays an occupational therapist Paul Safranek working in Omaha.
He has lost out on the chance to go to medical school because he had to
care for his mother. One day he and his wife see a former boss (Jason Sudeikis)
like a doll on a table, and Paul asked why did you “go
get small.” Pretty soon Paul and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) visit Leisureland in New Mexico (having seen the small people in
a box on the flight down) and take the sales pitch. They can live like
millionaires.
Paul takes the bait.
The scenes tracing the medical “downsizings” are scary enough. Paul’s body hair is removed (lopped off,
"thmooth") as well as the usual Army buzz
cut, and his teeth are pulled. The
actual downsizing chamber part takes only a few minutes. Paul wakes up, bald everywhere like a chemo
patient and checks his private parts.
Then he gets dental implants with microteeth
(because the real teeth don’t shrink and could cause his head to explode). I’ve had implants myself, and companies like
Clear Choice must be laughing at this.
Then Paul finds out that Audrey bailed out of the procedure and wants to
divorce him.
The hair grows back, fortunately. A year later, after
downsizing to an apartment on Leisureland and
starting to date single moms, and after hearing about the political
consequences of downsizing in the media, specifically the surreptitious
trafficking of downsized immigrants (despite travel bans!) Paul finds out, from
a housekeeper (Ngoc Lan Tran) that immigrants like her live in “barrios” for
downsized undocumented immigrants.
As with his mom, Paul is very susceptible to moral
pressure to give direct service to those in need, and
finds himself as a “doctor” working in the barrio. Then the movie takes a turn
to Norway, as a neighbor (Christoph Waltz) takes Paul on a trip to Norway to
see the original colony.
And here comes the other political consequence: the
Earth has reached its tipping point with the chain release of methane gas, so
the little people in Norway have set up a “Noah’s arc”
underground. Indeed, will the “normal people” become “the Leftovers”?
I did go through my own downsizing in a real estate
sense, from inherited house to condo, recently. And I had full dental implants
in 2013. I have yet to undergo a forced
shaving.
Also, ponder the fact that certain big cats underwent
downsizing thousands of years ago and became the domestic cats, one of the
planets most successful mammals. Sometimes it pays to “go small”.
There was a short film with another Marriott “Storybooked” artist, this time sculptor Felix Semper, who
visits San Sebastian, Spain (I visited it in 2001), in the Basque area, and
then Barcelona, which is dealing with a new Catalan separatist vote today.
La Concha Bay in San Sebastian (wiki).
Name: “Downsizing”
Director, writer: Alexander Payne
Released: 2017/12/21
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: Angelika Mosaic, 2017/12/22
Length: 135
Rating: R
Companies: Paramount (independent)
(Posted: Friday, December 22, 2017
at 11:15 PM EST)