Damon can’t do anything to save Alexander Payne’s ‘Downsizing’
Even before it completely falls apart, even before it begins to seem as though it were being made up on the spot, “Downsizing” is strangely unlovable. It’s a place we don’t want to visit, a world we don’t want to inhabit. Watching it feels like work.
Co-written and directed by Alexander Payne, the movie is an intelligent person’s response to the environmental and economic anxieties plaguing the modern world. Dumb sci-fi movies are all about the destruction of the universe, but “Downsizing” is more localized, serious and despairing. Its whole atmosphere is depressed — post-hope.