Downsizing - the little film that Oscar forgot

F.Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives however Alexander Payne seems determined to provide some exceptions to that rule. For my money Payne is one of the finest filmmakers of his generation and the notion of second chances is at the heart of his work and his most memorable characters.

Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002), Paul Giamatti in Sideways (2004), and even George Clooney in The Descendants (2011) have all been given the chance for do-overs late in life; for Nicholson it is almost in the very last frame. To that list we can now add Matt Damon in Downsizing, a clever and touching social satire which takes Payne into new territory.

Damon is Paul Safranek, a blue-collar hard-working sort of guy who is finding it hard to get by in an America not too far in the future. He and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are just about managing even if the mortgage payments and other pressures of everyday life are getting on top of him.

A radical new scientific development offers an outlet. They can be shrunk to only five inches tall, live in a miniaturised community, and reduce their outgoings to a fraction of their current level. This seems like the ideal solution but, as is often the case in Payne’s films, events conspire to make Paul re-evaluate his priorities and his life.

One of the joys of Downsizing for me is the marriage of a fine script and some remarkable craft skills. Working with his long-time collaborator Jim Taylor, Payne has constructed a script which is sharply satirical, witty, but undeniably human. It takes a number of disparate strands and weaves them together expertly to create an enormously satisfying whole. Like Warren Schmidt, Paul Safranek’s second chance comes late but it is no less rewarding for it.

The execution of the script is near-perfect. Payne eschews CGI or FX shots for the most part; the second half of the film is effectively an homage to Fifties sci-fi and it borrows heavily from the visual tropes of that genre. The miniature community is achieved mostly through oversized sets that could have come straight from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and the rest is achieved through performance and very clever cinematography from Phedon Papamichael who shot Payne’s last film Nebraska (2013)

Matt Damon is terrific in the sort of everyman role in which he excels and there is excellent support from Wiig and a quality cast that includes Christoph Waltz and Hong Chau – both of whom can consider themselves unfortunate to have been passed over for Supporting Actor and Actress nods.