Downsizing (Payne, 2017) is streaming on Netflix
Netflix is a frustrating service. They push their preferred “New! New! New!” content at you relentlessly but there is so much gold hidden beneath the surface that – as I said about DocPlay yesterday – I could fill this entire newsletter with their titles.
Downsizing has just been added to the Australia/NZ list and I’m delighted to recommend it. Alexander Payne is still probably best known for Sideways – two old friends visit wineries and argue – or the equally excellent The Descendants, featuring an all-time great performance from George Clooney.
In Downsizing, humans are being encouraged to shrink themselves, supposedly to reduce our intolerable and unsustainable environmental footprint.
A delightfully downbeat Matt Damon plays Paul, choosing to undergo the procedure not for the planet, but to make his money go further and live a life of luxury to which he feels entitled.
It does not go the way he expects.
I was lucky enough to review Downsizing for At the Movies when it was released in 2018.
Downsizing owes a debt to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, especially the Brobdingnagian section where our hero is a tiny figure in a land of giants. But it’s also a deeply spiritual film, not in the sense of promoting a specific faith, but by showing us this slightly overweight, incurious, blinkered westerner finding a purpose that he never even realised he needed, a need for real community as his former communities and associations splinter, isolate and withdraw themselves from the world.
And here’s the problem the film has had finding an audience. Firstly, it’s a lot to expect middle-America to go in huge numbers to a film that essentially insults them, but also it grows so much bigger and more profound than the wacky satire the marketing promises. It’s not a comforting experience. Even if you enjoy making fun of American materialism at the beginning, you might find that this film’s gaze is eventually turned on you.
Payne has a new film arriving in cinemas after Christmas: The Holdovers reunites him with Sideways’ Paul Giamatti.
Further reading
At RNZ this week I wrote about AMC+ and how it may be the best value streaming service you have never heard of. I recommended three shows to get you started.
