Just for the record: nobody doffs their clothes in “Juliet, Naked.” The title refers to an acoustic early version of a seminal album by Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), a fictional indie rocker who stopped performing 20 years ago in this lovely adaptation of the Nick Hornby (“About a Boy”) novel.
A tape of the record finds its way to the doorstep of Annie Platt (Rose Bryne), a woman living in a quaint seaside British village. Her longtime boyfriend, Duncan Thomson (Chris O’Dowd), runs a website lavishly devoted to the lost rock god. Annie had written some snarky comments on the site taking Tucker’s work down a peg or two, and the man himself writes her to agree, along with the tape.
A correspondence soon kicks up, and before long Tucker has come to Annie and Duncan’s town on some family business. As her moribund relationship crashes, a potential new one blooms.
The film, directed by Jesse Peretz from a screenplay by Jim Taylor, Tamara Jenkins and Evgenia Peretz, is less about the nature of faded celebrity than the quirky ways human connections happen, and expire. Annie and Duncan are seemingly content at the start of the story, but as events transpire the cracks in their relationship becoming yawning chasms.
Likewise, Tucker comes across at first blush as a lovable loser, a guy sponging off his ex-wife and content to never play in front of an audience again. But we see that his quirks are actually character flaws, such as being an erstwhile father to his far-flung children, though the proximity to Annie compels him to start working on these issues again.
Sweet and sad, “Juliet, Naked” is a tale of possibilities -- to do more and be more than we were yesterday.
Bonus features are alas rather scant. It consists of just a single documentary short, “Making Juliet, Naked.”
If they gave out awards for most promising films that come out during the awards cycle and turn out to be a colossal disappointment, I’ve no doubt “Downsizing” would be a top contender to win.
Starring Oscar winners Matt Damon and Christoph Waltz, from director Alexander Payne (“The Descendants”) and frequent script collaborator Jim Taylor (“Sideways”), both Academy Award owners themselves, “Downsizing” looked to be a pointed satire about consumerism and American obsession with status.
Matt Damon plays ordinary schlep Paul Safranek, who volunteers to go through the process of “minimization” along with his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig). This is a relatively new procedure developed in Norway where humans are shrunk down by 99%, so they consume much less food, water and space, thus putting the planet on a stronger path to a stable environment.
Of course, that’s not how it’s sold to the public. It turns out that it pays to “get small” -- quite literally. Like a lot of middle-class Americans, Paul and Audrey are struggling to get by financially. But it turns out that little folks live like kings, because of some screwy economic calculations that are deliberately left a little fuzzy.
Go little, retire early and trade in your hovel for a McMansion! Sounds great, right?
Things go south quickly for Paul when (spoiler alert) Audrey gets cold feet right before the procedure, and he’s left lonely, divorced and working in a lowly call center for little folk. His next door neighbor, Dusan (Waltz), lives the high life filled with parties and connections.
Through him Paul meets Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a political activist-turned-maid who opens up his eyes to the economic inequity at the heart of the minimization racket. The haves live the life of luxury they don’t deserve, while people like Tran can’t even get a decent prosthetic for her missing leg.
(Accenting the split between the ultra-rich and those who serve them is always an odd ploy coming from mainstream Hollywood, where multimillionaires are waited on hand and foot by subsidence help. But let’s move on.)
Things get really strange when the story takes the trio to Norway, where we meet some of the scientists who first developed the breakthrough and are now having second thoughts.
The first act of “Downsizing” is fairly smart and filled with funny observations. But right at the point where Paul is abandoned by his spouse, the movie jumps completely off the tracks and never finds its way back.
Lesson: if you’re going to hire Kristen Wiig, don’t give her the boot 30 minutes into the film.
Video extras are a might slim, and are limited to the Blu-ray version: the DVD contains none. They consist of six making-of documentary shorts: “Working with Alexander,” “The Cast,” “A Visual Journey,” “A Matter of Perspective,” “That Smile” and “A Global Concern.”
I’ve noticed that whenever Matt Damon has a comedic role where he’s playing a regular schlub, he always packs on about 25-30 pounds. At first I was impressed by the sheer devotion to physical transformation -- especially his uncanny ability to always get back to Jason Bourne fighting trim.
But over time, it’s come to feel like he’s making fun of the ordinary, unsculpted people who buy tickets to his movies. What are we to him, the pudgy faceless masses?
Hey Matt, not every middle-class person is living a life of quiet desperation with a dadbod.
I was very much looking forward to “Downsizing,” which the trailers present as a darkly satirical look at American consumerism and our footsie-playing approach to environmentalism.
In it, Norwegian scientists discover that by shrinking humans down to less than 1% of their current size, the crises of too little food and too much global warming can be addressed in a way to make human life sustainable in perpetuity. Of course, the real allure to “get small” is the scalable economy, so that a married couple struggling to get by, such as Paul and Audrey Safranek (Damon and Kristen Wiig), are instantly transformed into multimillionaires in a downsized community.
Unfortunately, this is not the film that director Alexander Payne and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor have given us. I was expecting something along the lines of Payne’s other work like “Sideways,” “About Schmidt” or “The Descendants.” They were cerebral movies that managed to explore the danker sides of the human soul while also finding plenty of occasions to make us laugh.
“Downsizing” is that, at least for the first 45 minutes or so. We watch as Paul and Audrey go through the process, meeting an old chum (Jason Sudeikis) at a high school reunion who was among the first go through “cellular minimization.” He talks it up to them -- and not just for the referral fee, he insists -- and they visit the facility where all the magic happens. They meet with a downsizing consultant, who informs them that their $152,000 in equity will make them worth over $12 million when they get small and go to Leisureland.
(The math sounds a little fishy to me, but hey, it’s Hollywood moviemaking, not an economics seminar.)
It sounds so simple: trade in your humdrum life of working hard for one in which you live in a mansion and enjoy an early retirement of luxury.
Things don’t go the way they expect, but I’m precluded from telling you more about the plot without giving too much information away. Suffice it to say there’s a point of no return, essentially marking the end of the first act, in which the movie’s tone shifts abruptly.
It’s like the movie takes a sudden left turn, it’s not funny anymore, and instead of satirical jabs we got a lot of lazy haymakers thrown at us that fail to connect.
The experiencing is like that scene in the first “Spider-Man” movie where Peter fights the school bully, and he can’t believe how slow the punches seem. That’s us: “What’s going on? Am I supposed to be laughing here?”
The special effects are pretty neat, though I kept waiting for a moment when a small person gets accidentally squished by their larger cousins. The film features plenty of celebrity cameos, including Margo Martindale, Laura Dern and Neil Patrick Harris.
Damon’s performance gets annoying rather quickly. Paul is passive and not particularly smart, continually letting others push him around. First it’s Audrey, then Dusan (Christoph Waltz), the gleefully corrupted neighbor he befriends, and later Ngoc Lan Tran, a Vietnamese maid who represents the flip side of Leisureland’s power dynamics.
She’s played by Hong Chau, in what first seems like a very stereotyped performance but later shows layers of emotions in a way that Damon’s does not.
I get what Payne and Taylor where going for: a parable about the fruitlessness of always chasing Eden. Paul and Audrey want a one-way ticket to an early heaven, but keep finding ways to make their lives more hellish. Rather than learn from it, they chase the next magic pill.
“Downsizing” is a great concept that soon spins off the track. It wants us to laugh at ourselves, but in the end it just makes us feel bad.
