In the Spotlight
By Sharmini Jayawardena
I give it just ⭐️ ⭐️ s the most! (Movie Rating: 2/5)
A movie hardly disappoints me. But, this one did. After having watched it, my immediate response was: “I didn’t like it”.
Starring Matt Damon as Paul Safranek, the occupational therapist who decides one fine day that he needed to downsize in order to be able to afford all of the luxuries that came with the procedure.
However, it didn’t work out for all of them, in the same salubrious way, with some of them ending up in ghettos of this failed experiment! Gentrification giving way to ghetto-ification where ever it went!
Worse still, the plot kept waxing and waning removing you from the illusion of what movie is all about. This, for me is, unpardonable, in a movie, to say the least!
A good movie takes you to another world and holds your attention there.
There was quite a bit of comic relief in the dialogue and also in the theme of these people who would even become literally smaller in size just to have it all! As, when you became smaller in size, the capacity for your wealth too increases, relatively. So, your increased wealth can now make that mansion you always wanted a reality.
But this guy, Paul, ends up all by himself, alone in the mansion, his wife having abandoned him at the imminent point of making the switch.
So, he ‘downsizes’ in the downsized world of Leisureland, which finds himself in a crappy job, moving into an apartment and the same cycle of the same old same old working itself out for him. He is bogged down having to find himself a date and having to put up with a noisy partying neighbor, Dusan.
Here, he comes face to face with the crummy lives of the cleaner women who comes over to clean up Dusan’s apartment.
It’s the twilight zone for him from then on, finding himself with a Vietnamese dissident gf, Hong Chau as Ngoc Lan Tran, (who was shrunk against her will by her government!), on whom he waits on hand and foot.
I wonder what the script writers thought! I mean, what gave them the idea for a Vietnamese dissident!
Although she does have a cool sense of humor I must say – who knew the Americans had seven types of fucks. Yep, fucks. I can’t remember the lot. But three of them are: angry fuck, love fuck and pity fuck!
Then, they all end up in the Norwegian fjords. Where the failed experiment first began! What they call the first colony! They are faced with this cult like the flower power wild-children who take off en masse to another place.
At which point Paul realizes his is a love fuck for Ngoc Lan Tran.
Every possible hideous horrific aspect you can find in the ‘real’ world is to be found in this ghetto-land, including the sick, the maimed and the evangelical!
Downsizing is a 2017 American science fiction comedy-drama film directed by Alexander Payne, written by Payne and Jim Taylor. Produced by Mark Johnson, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor.
