This movie is so good!  It is sci-fi in the very loosest sense, so loose that I didn’t even bother calculating if their shrinking human ratios checked out.  The gist of it is in the future, organic life can be shrunk to much, much smaller, and this means great things for sustainability.  At least that’s the inventor’s dream.  

What really happens is that people start “downsizing” as a way to *upsize* their wealth and status… when the savings of an average Joe are converted to small dollars, they become ridiculously rich and never have to work again, and can live in their massive-small mansions for the ends of their days.  Now some of that reads just like the “escape to the country” lines I’m always pushing, and it’s kind of true – downsize your city and you’ll upsize your lifestyle.  But this film is far more complicated than that.

It’s a rambling tale of the ups and downs (the bigs and smalls) of Paul Safranek’s (Matt Damon) journey to smallness.  So don’t go in expecting a standard narrative – this has twists and turns at every step, which makes it a thoroughly fascinating ride.  

At its heart it ends up being a gorgeous tale about finding meaning in your own small life and carries lashings of endearing human moments.  Now some might find that a bit sickly sweet, I guess, especially given some of the characters are connected to these ideas with religion.  Case in point, Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), the Vietnamese dissident who’s had an unfortunate journey in a tv-box (such a brilliant metaphor!!)  

A lot of the reviews that slam this film seem focussed on the idea that she is both a caricature and a victim for Paul to save – but I wonder if that’s because they can’t see past her broken English and sensationally emotive face?  That perhaps, they are so focussed on the superficial features of race, accent and culture that they can’t see her deeper, powerful role in this story?  

The flip side of this is all the people who hate this film because it apparently pushes too strong a progressive-agenda… so honestly, it’s hated from both standardised binary-political viewpoints, and that’s pretty cool in and of itself.

Visually, this gave me a whole new CGI experience.  In a time where I’m so used to bigness and explosions, this creates an amazing visual *landscape of small* through tiny touches.  The grain of plywood magnified for scale, the size of tiles, the height of a bus, the weave of a fabric…. Small things in every scene that are slightly off-kilter to remind you that this story is a human one told not on the standard human scale.  

While it might present as a fantasy or sci-fi, I’d call it something more like a socio-economic fiction (soc-ec-fic) maybe?  Within this film there are such strong aspects of the realities of our lack of sustainability and socio-economic worlds and classes that are shown clearly, and yet never explicitly explained – the viewer has to do a lot of connecting the dots themselves to make meaning.  

I found a deliciously satirical undercurrent here – it both tells the tale of becoming a *big humanitarian* through *small actions*, and finds a way to critique this at the same time.  And it’s possible that this is why so many people (according to the reviewing aggregates) don’t like it – satire is such a fine line so close to the truth that so many people don’t get it, or don’t like it when they do.  I for one loved it, even as I recognised my own vices within it.

J* gives it 5 stars.

PS.  For a small world, it’s a big story, clocking in at 2hrs 20mins.

PPS.  Even the character names used in this have poignant meanings.

<review written in 2018>