Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Downsizing is pleasant enough, which in a way is its problem. Director and co-writer Alexander Payne starts with a promising concept: the "downsizing" of the title is the new practice of undergoing a procedure, ostensibly to help the environmental effects of overpopulation, to shrink oneself to just a few inches tall. It's Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves for the intellectual set. Except no one takes this concept and really runs with it -- instead, it gets taken in the least interesting directions imagination.

I suppose movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids already covered the more sensational ideas of being shrunken to a tiny fraction of original size. Perhaps Payne was simply trying to explore uncharted territory here. I can respect that. The story, however, meanders, discarding characters as it moves in new directions without ever regarding them again, in ways that make little sense.

And I'm still a little stuck on how this movie ignores the much more immediate, practical dangers of being only five inches tall. Tackling issues of social justice and pending environmental collapse is all well and good, but what good is a story like this if none of the small people encounter, say, a cat? Or hell -- bugs! Actually, near the end, they do encounter a bug: a caravan of small people riding down a trail to a small-people settlement, the silhouette of a dragonfly seen through a giant leaf overhead. This plays like one of many examples of the wonderment that would come with this experience. All I could think was: what might dragonfly actually do with people five inches tall? A dragonfly itself can be as much as four inches in length -- 80% the height of these people!

This movie had a curious marketing campaign, likely because of how muddled its story ultimately turns out to be. In a second wave of trailers, the marketing itself reveals -- so, if you've seen the trailer, this is not a spoiler -- that the main character's wife backs out at the last minute. This is Paul and Audrey, played by Matt Damon and Kristin Wiig, the latter of whom is criminally underused in the end. And her backing out strikes me as a mite unrealistic on its own: would they really never notify the husband if the wife backs out, when they did everything on the same time table up to that point?

I have to wonder if this script might have been better, or at least more tightly polished, when the cast actually read it. This movie features a great many famous people in ultimately bit parts: Neil Patrick Harris and Laura Dern as part of a "small person" community presentation; Jason Sudeikis as a friend who helps Paul with his decisions. Margot Martindale is now famous just for being a character actress in countless small parts, but here she's onscreen for all of a few seconds.

As Paul moves on from certain acquaintances, he meets new ones: a neighbor (Christoph Waltz) who proves to be key to his destiny; a Vietnamese dissident (Hong Chau, the best thing in this movie) now working as a cleaning lady.

I hesitate to call Downsizing "boring," because it did keep me engaged -- barely. I spent a lot of time wondering what the point was, really. All the "big issues" this story tackles could easily be part of another story that did not involve shrinking people to five inches tall. Even when I saw the trailers, I kept figuring they were deliberately omitting something more sinister to the story, because of course there had to be. But I did imagine something more interesting, like, say, the danger of getting stepped on by normal sized people. In what world would all these small people be kept so uniformly safe?

The closest to real volatility this movie gets is when a guy at a bar argues that small people are not contributing enough to the economy and therefore should only be worth one fifth of a vote. That is to say, Downsizing is relatively inoffensive, the potentially problematic nature of Paul and Ngoc Lan Tran's relationship notwithstanding -- it gets uncomfortably close to "white savior" territory, although to be fair Paul turns out to be kind of a fuckup. It's also not nearly as compelling as it should be.

The concept itself is most compelling, indeed, and that's what holds the interest in the beginning, as the world is introduced to this procedure. The story then steadily heads toward more specific narrative threads, which break off in threads with little cohesion. Why would anyone find all this talk about comparative funds interesting? You won't finish this movie regretting having seen it, necessarily, but neither are you going to be thinking about it much the next day. It's a pretty wasted opportunity when such a unique concept is turned into something forgettable.

*Oh, who cares about obvious hazards? Let's talk about money!*

Overall: B-