Video review: "Downsizing"

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.”

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Review: "Downsizing"

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.

Review: "A Man Called Ove"

At first glance “A Man Called Ove” seems like a Swedish version of the bitter old man roles we’ve seen from the likes of Paul Newman (“Nobody’s Fool”) and Jack Nicholson (“About Schmidt”).

But really, it’s a love story. Not about falling in love, but reclaiming it.

Rolf Lassgård plays Ove, who seemingly lives solely to be a pain-in-the-tuckus, constantly insulting others and holding everyone to his own set of high standards. He’s the sort of petty authority figure who has bestowed himself with all sorts of powers, and acts as if this is something everyone has agreed upon.

Wearing the same nondescript cap and coat every day, he trudges around his orderly little village, tugging on locks to make sure they’re secure and hollering at the pet owners to keep their furry friends from piddling where they oughtn’t. Once upon a time he was chairman of the residents’ association, but his position was stripped years ago in a “coup” -- i.e., a democratic election -- and Ove clings to his bitterness like a talisman.

He has worked at the train depot for 43 years, following in his late father’s footsteps. When two young managers offer to transition him to a training program for older workers to acquire new skills, Ove cuts to the chase: Why don’t I just get up right now and leave, and make it simpler for all of us?

At age 59, Ove does not suffer fools -- a description he believes applies to virtually everyone but him.

Directed and written by Hannes Holm from the novel by Fredrik Backman, “A Man Called Ove” starts out in a very dark place and gradually moves toward the light. We sense the change and embrace it, so Ove’s evolution feels natural rather than compulsory.

After losing his job, Ove resolves to kill himself. His beloved wife, Sonja (a vibrant Ida Engvoll), passed away six months ago and with her his only connection to the happier things in life. Like many men his age and class, Ove is a hands-on sort who can fix almost anything and defines himself by his usefulness; he leaned on Sonja to be his connection to the community.

He tries suicide hanging, but is interrupted by a new family moving in across the street. The husband (Tobias Almborg) is an “idiot” (Ove’s favorite designation) who can’t even back up a car. But his wife, Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), is a headstrong woman from Iran who drops off saffron rice and enlist the older man’s in everything from babysitting her two daughters to giving driving lessons. She offers friendship, and eventually Ove responds with… irked tolerance.

(For him, that’s a breakthrough.)

Subsequent suicide attempts -- asphyxiation, shotgun, etc. -- are similarly disturbed by the intrusion of others, until it becomes a running joke. Visiting his wife’s grave daily, he promises to be with her soon… after he fixes a bicycle for a youngster, and Parvaneh’s baby is born, and so on.

Flashback sequences show us Ove as a boy (Viktor Baagøe) and later as a teenager and young man (Filip Berg). He obtained much of his blue-collar view of the world from his father (Stefan Gödicke), as well as his devotion to Saab automobiles. Later, he strikes up a friendship with a like-minded villager, but they angrily part ways over the other man’s affinity for Volvos and later -- ye gods! -- a BMW.

As the story unfolds, we discover Ove and how he became the man he is, and he rediscovers his own past and finds things there that are missing now. Here is a man who is constantly telling the story of himself, how the world is unfair and the corporate “whiteshirts” always get their way, whether it’s tearing down the family home or institutionalizing a neighbor. Ove learns he doesn’t like the yarn he’s been spinning.

“A Man Called Ove” is a splendidly acted and oddly sweet film. It’s about a miserable old wretch who wants to kill himself, and is continually foiled by other people who need him around. In seeking death, he keeps finding new reasons to live.