‘Downsizing’ on the up in Venice – Damon goes mini in festival opener

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VENICE, Italy, Aug 31, (Agencies): “Downsizing” has generated jumbo-sized buzz at the Venice Film Festival — not least as viewers debate how to describe it.

Is it a science fiction film, a romantic comedy, a political parable, an apocalyptic thriller? Alexander Payne’s movie mixes all those elements in its story of a man, played by Matt Damon, who tries to solve his problems by shrinking himself.

Damon and co-stars Kristen Wiig and Hong Chau joined Payne on the red carpet for the film’s Venice premiere Wednesday — the first of 11 days of galas that will bring stars including George Clooney and Jennifer Lawrence to the canal-crossed Italian city.

The Venice opening-night slot has become coveted by filmmakers hoping to make a splash come awards season. Several recent Venice openers, including “Gravity” and “La La Land”, have gone on to win multiple Academy Awards.

“Downsizing” has ingredients that could help it strike a similar chord with audiences and awards voters: a likable, bankable star in Damon; a strong supporting cast that includes Wiig and Christophe Waltz; and an imaginative story laced with compassion and humor.

Payne says despite its sci-fi premise and international canvas, “Downsizing” is not so different to the films he’s best known for — funny-sad stories of middle aged or Midwestern strugglers such as “About Schmidt”, “Sideways” and “Nebraska”.

“It has the same sense of humor and basically the same tone”, Payne told reporters in Venice on Wednesday.

The movie applies Payne’s wry eye for human foibles to a plot that explores the power and limits of science and the threat of environmental catastrophe.

The script by Payne and Jim Taylor opens with a Norwegian scientist making a breakthrough he thinks will save humanity: a technique that can shrink people to 5 inches (12 cms) tall. That means they use a tiny fraction of the resources they once did — and need to pay less, allowing people of modest means to grow instantly rich by becoming small.

The movie has fun imagining what the miniaturized world would be like, as Damon goes to live in a luxury micro-city, a sort of retirement community for the tiny.

Then it takes a serious turn to ask whether science could be humanity’s salvation, or whether stubbornly fallible human nature is likely to be our species’ undoing.

Along the way, a movie that started in the familiar Payne territory of Omaha, Nebraska, takes viewers all the way to an underground bunker in a Norwegian fjord.

Many will find the journey unexpected, but reviewers in Venice were mostly happy to be swept along for the ride. The Guardian called the film a “spry, nuanced, winningly digressive movie”, while the Hollywood Reporter said it was “captivating, funny” and “deeply humane”.

Ultimately, the film rests on Payne’s knack for depicting human relationships. Damon’s Paul becomes friends with a louche European neighbor, played by Waltz, and develops feelings for Ngoc Lan, a former Vietnamese political prisoner working as a house cleaner.

Performance

Actress Hong Chau (“Treme”, “Inherent Vice”) is already being talked of as a potential awards nominee for her performance as the spirited, complex character.

“This is a character that is normally in the background, that is low-status character in the culture, and not one that you typically see in the forefront of a story”, she said.

“Downsizing” is the latest ordinary-Joe role for Damon, who exudes a likable everyman-under-duress quality whether he’s action hero Jason Bourne or a stranded astronaut in “The Martian”.

Damon said he thinks movies “are the greatest tool for empathy that we have”.

“What I love about this — what I love about a lot of these stories that I get to help tell — is it shows a relatable character whose life is different from our own but who we find common cause with”, he said. “This is a beautiful and optimistic movie. A journalist said to me, which I thought was really great: ‘This is Alexander’s most optimistic movie and it has the apocalypse in it’”.

The film has been in the works for a decade, but in an AP interview, Damon said its environmental theme felt “torn from the headlines”.

“Though the (US) administration wouldn’t say that”, he added. “They’re not acknowledging climate change as a reality”.

A combination of ecological and material motivations for being shrunk appeal to Paul Safranek (Damon), a frustrated but well-meaning therapist, and his wife Audrey, played by Kristen Wiig.

They sign up for the surgery but she gets cold feet at the last minute, leaving Damon to embark alone on his adventure in the miniaturised world.

Among those he meets there are Christoph Waltz, who plays a louche, party-loving neighbour in his miniature condominium, and Vietnamese cleaner Ngoc Lan, played by Hong Chau.

She, it turns out, had been forcibly miniaturised after being imprisoned as a dissident in her homeland and has lost a leg below the knee as a result of being smuggled into the United States in a television box.

Damon strikes up a friendship with her, taking the film in an unexpected Romcom direction that allows Payne to tie up his themes about the search for a better life, impending environmental catastrophe and the need to live in the moment.

“It’s like a journalist I was speaking to said: it is Alexander’s most optimistic movie and it’s got the Apocalypse in it”, Damon quipped at the premiere press conference.

Scripted by two-time Oscar winner Payne and his frequent writing partner Jim Taylor, the film will be hoping to emulate the success of “La La Land”, “Birdman” and “Gravity”, all Venice openers which went on to bag awards.

Taylor said the film had been in the works for over a decade, playing down suggestions it was a commentary on Donald Trump’s controversial environmental policy.

“A lot of things caught up with the movie, we didn’t realise we were going to be sharing the film with the world we are living in”.

Also unveiled on the opening day was “Nico”, a bio-pic focusing on the final years of the Velvet Underground singer and Andy Warhol muse, shown in the festival’s “Horizons” section dedicated to cutting-edge productions.

“Downsizing” is one of 21 films competing for Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion, which will be handed out on Sept 9 along with other awards including the first for virtual reality productions.

A total of 71 films on show range from big-budget Hollywood productions, like George Clooney’s sixth directorial outing, “Suburbicon”, to new works by indie favourites Andrew Haigh and Warwick Thornton, via documentaries such as Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s look at the global refugee crisis, “Human Flow”.

British director Haigh will be presenting “Lean on Pete”, his first film since the acclaimed “45 Years”, while Thornton arrives in Venice next week to promote “Sweet Country”, a Western set in 1920s Australia that deals with the treatment of indigenous people.

Along with Clooney, major stars due on the red carpet include Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, who will pick up lifetime achievement awards while plugging their new film “Our Souls at Night”, a Netflix drama about a romance between two elderly neighbours.

Spanish superstar couple Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz team up again for “Loving Pablo”, in which Bardem plays Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar and Cruz his long-term mistress.

Bardem also stars opposite Jennifer Lawrence in “mother!”, one of several thrillers vying for honours, by “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky.

Promoted by a Mother’s Day-release of a poster showing Lawrence holding her own bloodied heart, the film tells the tale of a couple thrown into turmoil by uninvited guests.

Also expected to make waves, with an out-of-competition world premiere, is “Victoria & Abdul”, Stephen Frears’ treatment of Queen Victoria’s later-life friendship with an Indian clerk.

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