Alexander Payne’s Downsizing arrives with one of the best premises of the year and one of the strangest, most unresolved second halves. Matt Damon plays Paul Safranek, an occupational therapist in Omaha who agrees to be shrunk to approximately five inches (13 cm) so he and his wife can stretch their money in a luxury community for small people. The film premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2017, and Paramount released it in the United States on December 22, 2017. It runs 135 minutes. It is a science fiction comedy-drama that keeps switching what it wants to be, and that restlessness is both its charm and its problem.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
The Procedure and Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen
The mechanic is clean and clever. Norwegian scientist Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnsen, played by Rolf Lassgård, develops “downsizing” as a way to address overpopulation and global warming. The process is irreversible. It shrinks organic material, reducing people to approximately five inches (13 cm), which drastically decreases their consumption and waste. Asbjørnsen becomes one of the first human test subjects himself, and when the findings are revealed at a conference five years later, the world treats it as a sensation.
Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor get real mileage out of the premise’s economics before they get to its ethics. That order matters. The film is funniest and sharpest when it is about money — about what a dollar does when you are small enough to live in a dollhouse.
Dave Johnson at the Reunion
Ten years after the conference, Paul and his wife Audrey, played by Kristen Wiig, are struggling financially in Omaha. At Paul’s high school reunion they run into Dave and Carol Johnson, played by Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe, who have already downsized.
Dave does not sell the environmental line. He argues the real reason to do it is that your money goes much further when you are small. That is the film’s thesis in one scene, and Sudeikis delivers it with the flat confidence of a man who has done the math.
Paul and Audrey sign up. They pick Leisureland, New Mexico, one of the fancier communities for small individuals, and select a sprawling mansion using their greatly enhanced capital.
Leisureland and the Mansion Paul Keeps Alone
The procedure goes fine. The marriage does not. In a Leisureland recovery room, Paul gets a call from Audrey, who says she backed out at the last minute. Because they are now different sizes, she is leaving him. Paul is left in solitary occupancy of the mansion they chose together.
Leisureland itself is the film’s best piece of design work and its coldest joke. It is an attractive but bland consumerist enclave for the newly rich and downsized, protected by high walls and a dome. It looks like a resort and functions like a gated suburb with no exit.
A year later, Paul signs his divorce papers. He had let his occupational therapy license lapse, never expecting to need work after being shrunk, so he moves out of the mansion into an apartment and takes a customer service job at Lands’ End. He dates someone, and they break up.
This stretch is where Downsizing starts to drift. The satire loses its target. Paul’s loneliness is real, but the film does not know whether it wants us to laugh at Leisureland, pity him, or both.
Dusan Mirkovic and Ngoc Lan Tran
Then Christoph Waltz shows up as Dusan Mirkovic, and the movie changes gears entirely. Dusan is a black-market operator with a taste for the good life and a loose relationship with the rules.
Through Dusan, Paul meets Ngoc Lan Tran, played by Hong Chau. She is an impoverished activist, and she is the best thing in the back half of the film. Chau plays her with a hard, unsentimental practicality that the script around her does not always earn. Her nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 75th Golden Globe Awards was deserved, and it is the clearest sign that the film’s instincts about character were better than its instincts about structure.
“We are meant for something bigger.”
That tagline hangs over the whole movie, and by the final act the film tries to cash it in literally. Paul’s journey takes an unexpected turn after he befriends Ngoc Lan Tran, and the story reaches for questions about extinction, duty and what a person owes the world. It gets there by way of a plot turn that feels imported from a different, more solemn film.
Where the Cast Lands
Damon is fine. He is asked to be decent and a little passive, and he is decent and a little passive. The role needs a man who let life happen to him, and Damon plays that without vanity. But he is also the least interesting presence on screen for long stretches.
Waltz does his Waltz thing, which is enjoyable and familiar. Chau is the revelation. Udo Kier appears as Konrad, Søren Pilmark as Dr. Andreas Jacobsen, and Rolf Lassgård and Ingjerd Egeberg as the Asbjørnsens.
The cameo roster is deep, and the film uses it well: Joaquim de Almeida as Conference Director Dr. Oswaldo Pereira, James Van Der Beek as an anesthesiologist and former classmate of Paul’s at the reunion, Neil Patrick Harris and Laura Dern as Jeff and Laura Lonowski giving a Leisureland sales presentation, Niecy Nash as a Leisureland salesperson, Margo Martindale as a small woman on a shuttle bus, Donna Lynne Champlin as a Leisureland administrator, Don Lake as guide Matt, Kerri Kenney-Silver as Kristen, Jayne Houdyshell as Paul’s ailing mother, and Pepe Serna as Señor Cárdenas.
The Leisureland sales presentation with Harris and Dern is the film’s high point for pure comic invention. It is also the last time the movie is fully in control of its own tone.
What the Film Gets Right, and What It Wastes
Here is the case for Downsizing. The premise is genuinely original, the production design is precise, and the first hour is a smart, funny piece of speculative satire about American consumption and the fantasy of starting over. It has a real idea: that the promise of a better world is usually just a better deal for the people who can afford the entry fee.
Here is the case against. The film cannot decide whether Leisureland is a trap, a punchline or a tragedy, so it plays as all three at different times without committing. The environmental premise that launches the story — overpopulation and global warming — gets abandoned for a long middle section about a man’s divorce and his customer service job. And the final act introduces stakes so large that the small, human comedy underneath them gets crushed.
The result is a movie that is easier to admire in pieces than to love whole.
The Numbers and the Verdict
Downsizing was a box-office bomb. It grossed only $55 million against a production budget of $68–76 million. Reviews were mixed. And yet the National Board of Review chose it as one of the top ten films of 2017, which tells you the craft was visible even to people who found the whole unsatisfying.
Both things are true, and the gap between them is the story of this movie. A $68–76 million budget is a bet that Payne could turn a high-concept comedy into a mainstream hit. That bet failed at the box office, but the film’s reputation problem is not that audiences stayed away. It is that the movie spends its first hour building something sharp and then hands the wheel to a different, mushier film.
So where does that leave us? Downsizing is worth seeing for Chau, for the Leisureland sequence, and for a premise that no other 2017 studio release attempted. It is not worth defending as a whole. The parts that work are genuinely good, and the parts that do not are not small failures — they are structural. A film about shrinking people should have a tighter grip on its own scale.
Ranking the film’s assets, in order of how much they carry:
- Hong Chau as Ngoc Lan Tran, the performance that gives the back half its only real pulse.
- The Leisureland sales presentation with Neil Patrick Harris and Laura Dern, the sharpest comic set piece in the film.
- The economics of downsizing as a satire of American consumption, which the first act nails.
- Matt Damon’s Paul Safranek, serviceable but too passive to anchor 135 minutes.
- The final act’s shift into existential territory, which the film cannot support.
That is a lot of value in the first three slots and very little in the last two.
Payne and Taylor wrote a script with a great first act and no clear ending, and Payne directed it with more visual control than narrative discipline. The film’s defenders point to its ambition. The film’s critics point to its sprawl. Neither is wrong.
What matters most, in the end, is that Downsizing is a movie about the fantasy of escaping your problems by changing your size, and it never quite decides whether that fantasy is absurd, tragic or both. That indecision is the film’s defining quality. It is also why the movie lands as a near miss rather than a triumph.
6.3 of 10.
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