The 2017 sci-fi comedy Downsizing is an unusual film. Most of the humor is dry, usually relying on wry satire or coming at the expense of the hapless protagonist, Paul Sefranek (Matt Damon), a painfully average, boring man who agrees to undergo the revolutionary procedure of downsizing along with his wife.
The couple will be irreversibly shrunk down to approximately five inches tall. At that height, the total materials needed to feed, clothe, and shelter them will be exponentially less than they are at full size. Their money will go farther (the movie converts $150k to $12mil), allowing them to live a life of luxury. Importantly, by downsizing, they will reduce the amount of waste they produce and dramatically lower their consumption, framing downsizing as the ultimate solution to overpopulation, just as its inventor, a well-meaning Norwegian scientist, intended.
After a compelling sales pitch covering all of these points, Paul and his wife buy a mansion in Leisureland, an idyllic, sheltered community for downsized people. This is the intriguing sci-fi premise behind Downsizing: a miracle of science will show us how different life can be at miniature scale as our protagonists enjoy all of the luxuries denied to them as financially-struggling, middle class Americans.
When Paul wakes up from the procedure, he is confronted by his wife…who is still big. She flaked, full of excuses, and begins divorce proceedings. Without her, Paul’s new dream life is hollow — and unaffordable. A year later, as he signs the divorce papers, the mansion is gone and Paul finds himself in an average apartment, unretired and working a lame call center job, still alone and isolated, unsure of what to make of his life…and permanently five inches tall.
Downsizing really feels like three films in one. The first part is about the process of downsizing, and culminates in Paul’s loss of the life he expected. It leans heavily into sci-fi, tracking the discovery of downsizing in a Norwegian laboratory, its announcement at a scientific conference, and how the average person reacts to the new phenomenon. Alongside Paul, we hear the rational case for downsizing and become amazed that such a thing is possible.
It is actually very cool; when Paul gets downsized, the production design leans hard into retro-futuristic, with oversized nobs and levers and bulky consoles. When the staff lifts all of the freshly-shrunken people from their gurneys, they use stainless steel spatulas, as if the five-inch folks were freshly-baked cookies. It’s so charming.
Production designer Stefania Cella and her team really did a great job designing the sets, taking inspiration from a distinctly 1950s vision of the future, a Tomorrowland/Epcot aesthetic. In doing so, they free the movie’s own aesthetic from aging, rendering it timeless in the same way the most enjoyable sci-fi always feels timeless.
This is even more amazing when you consider that almost every special effect in the movie was done practically, using models, forced perspective, and giant props, like a 20'x 8' cereal box or 7:1 scale spatula attached to a custom-built cherry picker to produce that delightful moment. Movie magic at its best!
Much of this third of the movie is allowing Paul to be the audience point-of-view character, sort of bemusedly commenting on the interesting ways the downsized world co-exists with the full-size world, the same way we are as viewers. It’s quite fun, honestly. Paul never really loses that quality, either, even as we move into the more…provoking two-thirds. He just sort of stumbles through the world, being moved by everything but himself, and every time we see a clever innovation to accommodate downsized people or even just a surprising, giant object, Paul goes, “Hey — wow!” and we do, too. Eventually, Paul is moved into position to see things from a very different perspective, one that’s even more unfamiliar to the middle-aged, Midwestern Paul — and most of us.
Regrettably, Downsizing received polarizing reviews and was a commercial failure. Richard Brody’s unfavorable review for The New Yorker formulated the “thirds” framework that I’m using here and illustrated some of the issues critics had with the film. Downsizing “is three movies in one — a passable one, a terrific one, and a terrible one,” he wrote. “They’re unified in the realization of the movie’s big idea, but the movie’s straining after a big idea is its overarching weakness.”
While I like the idea of viewing Downsizing as a sort of serial, combining three episodes into one runtime, I disagree with Brody on where he divides the film into thirds. Bafflingly, he views the scenes with Paul and his wife as a typical Alexander Payne Midwestern drama, separate from any of the sci-fi worldbuilding, despite being bookended by the most interesting elements of it (the discovery and the procedure). Shouldn’t we instead divide the movie at the ends of Acts I and II — you know, like we normally do?
It makes no sense to separate Paul’s financial and marital troubles from the scenes where he is downsized. Further, Paul’s entire Leisureland experience perfectly fits into the second act, with the trip to Norway as the third, but I digress.
Regarding execution, I see where Brody is coming from, but I sincerely disagree with his conclusions. On first watch, Downsizing seems to have pacing issues and some wild narrative pivots, but once you understand the movie’s “big idea,” it’s clear that every scene is building towards the realization of it.
Paul’s passivity feels strange at first, but his aimless wandering allows us to see slice-of-life glimpses of the world, so it’s tolerable. For most of the experience, it’s not totally clear that Paul’s character is developing; he’s mostly oblivious, completing his arc in one delayed payoff, instead of changing throughout the film like a typical protagonist. I think Brody’s criticism focuses on the wandering and fails to account for the payoff.
I relate more with The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy, who praised Downsizing’s “zig-zag structure that makes it impossible to anticipate where it’s headed.” The unexpected revelations drive home the movie’s point that policy often has unintended sociological effects that are left out of proponents’ persuasive rhetoric. The narrative zig-zags occur whenever Paul is brave enough to peek behind the curtain for us.
Echoing Brody, in a particularly negative review for The Atlantic, David Sims wrote: “All of Downsizing’s story elements are so audacious that I was rooting for Payne to make some narrative sense of them…the only insight the movie offers is that stagnation is part of existence, and that while we probably can’t stop the world from ending with unbelievable scientific breakthroughs, all that matters is that humans are there for each other. It’s a sickly sweet and mundane message.”
Sims’s interpretation is so wildly off-mark, I’m wondering if he watched a different movie. For one thing, the text of the movie challenges Paul’s stagnation from the very beginning. For another, reducing the movie’s core idea to humans being there for each other is ignoring the call for direct, local action instead of treating social consciousness as a lifestyle fad.
We’re meant to criticize Paul for fully buying the pitch of downsizing as a lifestyle, including the part about saving the world. The character Dave (Jason Sudeikis), a downsized high school classmate Paul speaks to at a reunion, outright says it:
DAVE: That’s the thing. We both needed a change. You know, start all over.
PAUL: It must feel good knowing you’re making a real difference, too.
DAVE: You mean all that crap about saving the planet? Downsizing is about saving yourself. Takes the pressure right off, especially money pressure…We live like kings.
Would Paul have been as enthusiastic if his money hadn’t converted so generously, or if Leisureland hadn’t promised him everything he ever wanted in exchange for his sacrifice? Paul’s character flaw is that he does everything passively and in comfort, including activism, and the movie is prepared to jolt him into action.
The point becomes clear in the second act. You see, downsizing has a dark side: it’s a favorite tool of the world’s despots, always seeking better and crueler ways to silence political dissidents. Forcibly shrunk down, the people who threaten existing power structures are easily disposed of. One such political prisoner, Vietnamese dissident Ngoc Lan Tran, makes a daring escape to America that costs her a leg. A year later, Tran doesn’t expect to be recognized. She anonymously makes her living as the housekeeper for Paul’s upstairs neighbor, an archetypal European playboy party host named Dusan, played marvelously by Christoph Waltz.
Paul enthusiastically greets her — he saw her on the news — but Tran is uncomfortable being treated like a celebrity. The trauma she carries from her experience hasn’t occurred to Paul, and his excitement comes off as calloused. It’s only when Paul offers to use his experience as an occupational therapist to fix her prosthetic that Tran opens up to him. She takes him to a new reality just outside Leisureland’s walls: an overpopulated slum of impoverished service workers surviving with no resources and no support.
Tran acts as a social worker for her neighbors, bringing leftover food and expired medications back from her housekeeping work to comfort the afflicted in her community. She enlists Paul to act as a doctor, and while he objects, saying he’s not qualified, Tran convinces him that no other help is coming. He is here, he is willing, and he has skills that her community desperately needs. Paul begins to serve. He’s reluctant, but notably never complains, even as Dusan playfully taunts him.
Tran is played brilliantly by actress Hong Chau. She is a dynamo. A child of refugees, Chau based her character on her mother and father and the Vietnamese refugee community she grew up in, right down to speech patterns. She’s tough; fiery and assertive, speaking in broken English but clearly understood, refusing to be limited by communication barriers. She is a new force in Paul’s life, guiding him to truths his relative privilege has caused him to miss: “Glass-domed Leisureland is merely America in microcosm, with all the same corruption and wealth-disparity, loneliness and strife,” wrote Xan Brooks for The Guardian. The strongest personality in Paul’s life, Tran gets him out of his bubble.
This is another aspect of Downsizing that drew criticism. Tran was frequently labeled a harmful Asian stereotype due to her strong accent, and there was a camp of critics that viewed her as a token meant to make Paul appear more righteous through association— basically, a prop to let him play the part of “White savior.”
This take doesn’t give the film or the actress enough credit. Tran is the most compelling character in the film! Despite the presence of the plainly wealthy free-spirit Dusan, who wallows in excess, she is the character who shows the most agency. Nevertheless, Chau empathized with the criticisms, because she realized the combination of her character’s ethnicity and occupation “brings up the race and class issue and inequality and discrimination. That’s a lot to unpack, so it’s not just about an accent being problematic.”
Rebutting the criticisms, she explained, “My character, and other minority characters in this story, are not there to prop up the White, male character and show him in this great, positive light. If anything, we’re showing that he’s part of the problem because he’s not paying attention.”
The conflict between Paul and Tran comes to a head in the third act when Dusan takes them to visit the original colony of downsized people in Norway. Their highly-anticipated trip turns bittersweet as the creator of downsizing, the scientist from the beginning of the film, reveals that humanity’s efforts were too little, too late. The polar ice caps have melted sufficiently for the methane stored inside to escape, and the greenhouse effect will soon end life on Earth as we know it.
Their solution is to move underground, having prepared an impressive subterranean environment that will secure humanity’s future, no matter what happens outside. This sounds just as wonderful to Paul as the initial idea of downsizing, for all the same reasons. Like the slick Leisureland salesman and like all cults, the colony preys upon Paul’s longing for meaning, promising him that the act of going underground is his next opportunity to save the world.
Regrettably, to do it, he has to sacrifice his blossoming romance with Tran. As she implores him to stay with her, instead of going down the “stupid hole,” Paul reveals something crucial about his character, crying, “If I don’t do this, who am I? I mean, really. Who am I?”
Paul views his entire life up to that point as a prologue to one big, world-shaking action that defines his legacy. Now it’s clear to Paul that his destiny is to go underground and help save humanity, not live out his life in Leisureland, as he previously thought. “If I’m not supposed to be a part of this thing, then why am I here?” he implores. “I finally have the chance to do something that matters.”
This is the movie’s big idea, finally confronted, and far from fumbling that idea, I think it resolves perfectly. Paul is a mark. He keeps getting duped by big claims. He’s desperate for someone to tell him exactly what he can do to have a meaningful life. Influenced by Tran, who he admires, he no longer even cares about himself. He’s willing to give up everything and become a martyr, if it’s helpful. Please, someone tell him that it’s helpful!
Like all of us, though, what Paul actually needs is to decide his own purpose and embrace it. The point is smaller, simpler, and more deftly executed than many critics expected, and I suspect that’s some part of the disconnect between the two camps. The third act feels like it’s building to an epic finale, but the climax is just a brief conversation, then the movie kind of just concludes with an epilogue.
It begins with Paul headed down the “stupid hole,” committed and excited to start his purpose-driven life. Paul doesn’t realize that he’s already found his purpose until almost too late. Just before the underground vault is sealed — with him in it — a film’s worth of character development hits him like a bolt of lightning, and he turns around and embraces now.
The apocalypse won’t arrive for thousands of years, and in the meantime, he has a woman he loves, fun friends who appreciate him, and the ability to help thousands of needy people just a short drive away. No longer will Paul live for future generations; he will focus on his own.
This is the movie’s main political point. For good or bad, special interests often use grand pronouncements to coax people into action. Making a difference, finding purpose, doesn’t have to be a world-shaking action. As the movie ends, we find Paul and Tran out in the pouring rain, delivering donated food to the slum from earlier. They are taking local action together. They are building and serving community.
They are happier than ever.
One final line of attack by critics is Downsizing’s supposed aggressive, fence-sitting politics. The New Yorker’s Brody paints it as downright cynical, “vehemently” attacking every position: the people who downsized for greed and the people who downsized for the good of mankind, as well as the very concept of downsizing. In Brody’s conception, Downsizing isn’t happy with anyone’s choices, only focusing on the negative consequences of every decision.
While I think the movie does call the average, apolitical American to the carpet, imploring us to open our eyes to systematic injustice, the scale is so much smaller than Brody implies. The lesson is simple, not scattered, and gentle, not biting: we don’t need to wait for advanced technology to arrive to solve the world’s problems. Every person has something they can contribute and a community to share it with. It’s neither mundane nor profound, and while not in-your-face, I don’t think it’s fair to call it saccharine.
In our world, where problems feel huge and insurmountable, it can be tempting to wait for the major innovation to arrive that will save the day. It’s not unusual to long for someone to give us a blueprint, and it’s far harder to step outside of our comfort zones and intentionally seek opportunities to do good for other people.
I don’t think Downsizing gets enough credit for its sublime execution. The effects are amazing, the writing is smart, and the performances are memorable. It may not be for everyone. Even though I disagree with the negative reviews, I see how they arrived at (most of) their points. Unfortunately, I think they miss out on a fun sci-fi adventure because they expected more ambition, an attempt at utopia. What they got instead was a touching, human story that ends on a satisfying payoff and a couple-sized happy note. The journey to get there is the real draw.
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