A review with brevity (if not wit)
I suspect many people are going to call Alexander Payne’s new movie downsizing a “liberal environmentalist fantasy.”
Those people will be wrong.
Downsizing might, in a sense, be a liberal movie, but it is in no way an environmentalist fantasy.
As someone who started researching climate change in 1989, I would suggest that Downsizing is really summarized vest by these immortal words of Morrissey:
“And if a double-decker bus. Crashes into us. To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.”
More than by these important words that were spoken by former Vice President Al Gore:
“Ultimately, we are going to win this thing…It requires changes beyond our routine,”
In other words, I suspect that Alexander Payne has reached a place of “post-climate change” ethics where we have grown beyond technological management solutions (like Downsizing aka the ability to reduce people to a much smaller size in order to maximize resources) and where the alternatives presented by the radical environmentalists are too extreme for us to embrace (without losing our humanity).
Downsizing is a very good (possibly a great movie) that uses “high-concept” to destabilize and open you to the importance of valuing love even in the face of annihilation.
Dystopian Wit
Rather than confront us with a post-apocalyptic Mad Max style wasteland Alexander Payne kills us with sunshine, affordable mansions, and the threat of being made smaller.
But, just like Stanley Kubrick taught us that in a dystopia the living remainder might envy the dead (in Dr. Strangelove) Payne is teaching us that. in neo-Malthusian crisis. those in Penthouses and bunkers ought to envy those poor fools “choosing” ghetto life (welfare queens before real housewives).
What Downsizing might ultimately be “about” is what my friend, the historian Peter Linebaugh, has called “embracing the ruins” or celebrating and vociferously defending the spaces that won’t ever be featured in People magazine, on Bravo TV, or that would never benefit from the Trump Tax Plan.
The heart of the movie is an amazing performance by Hong Chau who plays Ngoc Lan Tran a Vietnamese dissident who was jailed for three years and tortured/silenced by “downsizing” (she ended up losing one leg below the knee in the process) but then was saved and sent to America.
Hers was one of the most grounded, human, and moving acting performances I have seen in recent memory. It was as jarring as an alarm clock but just as on time and necessary.
This is a movie radical in its embrace of sharing its food with a disabled man in a postmodern favela instead of sharing a gourmet meal with select foodies in a gated community (aka a bunker) but it doesn’t pretend to have answers to climate change or to attempt to justify radical solutions or judge people who ignore climate change entirely.
Like most radical works of art, you likely will at times feel unmoored or even uncomfortable, but there are real benefits to remaining open to this movie. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did (oh, and just in case you weren’t already aware, it stars Matt Damon).
Thinking Out Loud
- I am a big fan of Alexander Payne’s work. In particular, I loved “The Descendants” and “Election.” I also very much enjoyed “Sideways,” “Nebraska,” and “About Schmidt.” I didn’t dislike “Cedar Rapids.”
- Downsizing made me remember the book “Biospheres” by Dorion Sagan which I read many years ago (it is a book that suggests that our domination of the earth is part of a natural process and that our ultimate destiny is to escape planet earth and live among the stars). I actually passionately believe in climate change and that we should change our ways but, if we have passed beyond our ability to turn back the clock on warming, we might have nothing left but to hope that Mr. Sagan was right.
- Downsizing also reminded me of an article I read decades ago (I can’t remember the source) suggesting that the best way to save the planet was to genetically engineer smaller people (for exactly the same reason suggested in the movie). Since then, this idea has gone mainstream in the scariest possible ways.
- I wish that the previews and trailers had not given away the Kristen Wiig twist in advance. I think it dulled the emotional impact.
- Lots of great performances here from Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier and from Matt Damon to Jason Sudeikis everyone does a great job.
Josh is a blogger and freelance writer who writes about television, movies, music, politics, race, ethics, and whatever else seems interesting at the time.
Conclusion: An Important Movie Likely to be Massively Misinterpreted But Well Worth Your Trip to the Theater.
