Review of Downsizing (2017) by Maureenos — 27 Dec 2017

I assumed Downsizing would be light entertainment to kill a couple of hours before meeting friends in the food court. Instead, it riveted my attention from the beginning.The silly premise of people, en masse, shrinking down to five inches is the vehicle for an existential work of art more akin to Camus' The Plague, or Kafka's The Metamorphosis, than 'Honey, I Shrank the Kids'.

To reduce the human carbon footprint, a scientist discovers a way to shrink people down to five inches. Not only will small people consume less but their personal wealth will increase in inverse proportion to their new size as their tiny houses and other necessities of life will now cost pennies on the dollar.

This increase in wealth is the marketing tool used to entice customers to downsize. The movie opens at a scientific conference to announce the discovery of the transformational process. But the cutting-edge scientific tone soon shifts to a campy small town setting where the main character, Paul Safraneck, played by Matt Damon, is seen caring for his sick, aged mother.

Both tone and settings kept ricocheting off in unexpected directions like marbles in a pinball machine. Worlds meld into worlds. A tunnel connects an idyllic small community to its dystopian counterpart of bleak carton-sized cement blocks of tiered units that house the poor and disenfranchized.

Another tunnel is like the stuff of dreams, where the dreamer must choose to proceed one way or the other, forever sealing his fate depending on which way he goes. An Avatar-like forest filled with a lush extravagance of giant leaves and flowers seem magical from the perspective of people five inches tall.

A scene of workplace banter among medical techs in a huge transformation plant seems mundane enough until a door opens and the giant head of a 'big' co-worker fills the doorway. But rather than feeling disjointed, the constantly shifting tone and settings are more like the whorls and eddies in a swiftly flowing mountain stream, with Paul a leaf floating Zen-like atop the ever-changing current.

Matt Damon's acting talent shines as Paul is repeatedly thrust into bewildering circumstances and meets them with an expression of pure receptivity, the receptivity usually seen in children who find themselves in a perplexing adult situation and stand, transfixed, soaking everything up like a sponge.

It's the receptivity to ever-changing circumstance and banishment of desires that's been timelessly advocated by Eastern mystics. I'd always assumed that by 'desire' these wisdom traditions meant desiring material things like cars and houses, or the more ephemeral desires of ambition and competition.

But Paul not only has no interest in material wealth, which he shows by moving out of his tiny mansion into an apartment, neither does he have any 'What's in this for me?' or 'How do I get out of this mess?' personal agenda.

He's neither self-pitying or rageful as his new small life goes unexpectedly wrong. He doesn't seem to desire anything - only to immerse himself in the flow of his new life, doing whatever is required of him in every shifting situation.

I never knew what the Zen virtue of egolessness looked like before. Now I do. It looks like Paul Safranek. Paul has an unassuming presence. He runs like Forest Gump. His good nature is evident from the beginning when he rushes home from his job as an industrial occupational therapist to care for his sick mother.

Only later do we learn the great sacrifice he made career-wise to move back home to care for her. A number of highly creative scenes are memorable, like when Paul struggles to carry a beautiful normal sized rose as a gift to a neighbor.

Or the eerily real dialogue when trapped in a car with a stranger, he's forced to make polite conversation immediately after receiving a devastating loss. Or the visually surreal ballet without music as hundreds of still anesthetized newly made small people are adeptly scooped up onto spatulas and placed in carts for transport by giant techs with all the precision and repetitive motion of workers on an assembly line.

A wordless backward glance at an old man in a wheelchair chomping down on a cold piece of chicken says everything necessary about who Paul is, and what motivates him. The only reason I didn't give Downsizing a 10 is because I found the role of Tran played by Hong Chou just a bit too abrasive.

As the movie neared the end, something made me look away from the screen and around the darkened theatre. It was something odd I sensed. Only about a dozen other people were there with me. But there was no crinkling of candy wrappers, no shifting in seats.

There was an atmosphere of deep silence, a collective of mental energy inwardly focused, like in a church where only a handful of people are sitting or kneeling, intent only on their prayers. Not surprising, since Downsizing is ultimately a deeply spiritual movie.