The white mice in a snow-fringed Norwegian institute are injected with a serum and the head scientist is delighted. The mice have shrunk in a rapid process at the cellular level. Originally endowed by profits made from World War I mustard gas, the institute is an organization with a guilty conscience that seeks to promote “the wonders of science to help mankind.” When the experiment is demonstrated at an international conference whose keynote speaker is that head scientist—fit, healthy and standing five inches—its avowed purpose is to solve the population crisis, a task made urgent by climate change.
Thirty-six volunteers had already joined that scientist in a “self-sustaining community” protected from predators by a transparent dome. The rustic village along a picturesque fjord looks idyllic: the tiny residents consume and produce less waste as well as occupy less space. Small is good. The population bomb is defused. Utopia is in reach.
Or not? As the seriously ill mother of Downsizing’s everyman protagonist Paul (Matt Damon) grouses: They can spend all that money downsizing people, “but they can’t cure my fibromyalgia?” It’s the opening note in a sour chorus that will dog all that ungrounded optimism.
Downsizing’s director, Alexander Payne (Election Day, Nebraska), has never shown much patience with trendy pieties. His new film is a brilliantly devastating satire of many things, beginning with scientists who don’t understand human dynamics and rising through the buzz-phrase sales-driven banality of everyday life and the widespread willingness to embrace solutions without examining their consequences. It’s a comedy with Lilliputian sight gags that treat its science-fiction scenario lightly, at least for the first hour, until life grows darker and darker. Paul and his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig), their lives dead-ended by student loans and bills and unhappy in a society that promises happiness, decide to downsize. Like most people, they’re not helping the planet but helping themselves.
The procedure is painless if irreversible. Their promised future is inside a domed community where everyone gets a McMansion and health care—the package level depending on the amount of assets you can liquidate and supported by tax breaks. It’s promised as a gated community without crime. The promotional hype shows a set of tiny “conflict-free diamond” jewelry selling for $83, same price as the average two-month cost of groceries for a downsized couple.
Paul and Audrey sign up—and his first shock comes in the recovery room when the nurse brings a cellphone with his wife on the other end. At the last second, she backed out. “Don’t hate me,” she pleads lamely.
Meanwhile, the outside world sees increasing problems with downsizing, despite the benign Norwegian image of a community in organic wool sweaters and Birkenstocks, gathered in drum circles and living a well-endowed neo-hippie lifestyle. Some folks think the downsized should be allowed only 1/8 of a vote, given their contribution to a consumption-based economy is proportionately reduced. The undocumented downsized are pouring through the borders, spurring fear of crime and terrorism. In a much-publicized incident, a Vietnamese environmental activist was punished with downsizing and shipped to the U.S. with other dissidents in a TV container. Seventeen dead bodies were found in the crate; the environmental activist survived but lost a leg.
And it gets worse. Paul’s divorce settlement deprives him of his McMansion, forcing him to work at a call center to support himself. Turns out the American class system has replicated itself among the “small people.” He meets a pair of cosmopolitan hustlers (marvelous performances by Christoph Waltz and Udo Keir) who have turned the global network of small villages into a herd of cash cows. Their homes are cleaned by Hispanic and Asian women who live behind walls in a tenement slum. The plucky one-legged Vietnamese activist has organized them into a cleaning service. She will become significant in Paul’s life.
Written by Payne with long-time collaborator Jim Taylor, Downsizing lets no side of any issue off with easy answers. It wonders about destiny and chance, the power of faith and deception, the naiveté of liberals and the blindness of conservatives, against the backdrop of changes in the global climate that threaten the survival of humans, large and small.
