I was under an impression that Paramount had decided not to run FYC ads for Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, given the underwhelming response from critics and (from what I hear) industry audiences. But now they’re running ads on behalf of costar Hong Chau, who’s been nominated for Best Supporting Actress by the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, the HFPA (Golden Globe awards) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Hollywood Elsewhere, which has run many FYC Paramount ads in years past, would’ve liked to have been in on this. Was I…what, punished for describing her character as “spirited, peg-legged and often hard to understand”? That doesn’t mean an Academy or SAG member couldn’t legitimately say “I liked her performance enough to nominate it.” Hollywood Elsewhere believes in striking performances!

Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, an intelligent, well-made film with a fascinating hook, is a dead puppy. It earned $768 per screen after opening yesterday in 2668 situations. This on top of the 52% and 63% respective scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic plus a Cinemascore C grade. Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reports that under-25 viewers “hated it.”

I’m still advising HE readers to catch it this weekend. It’s not a typical “burn” but a sometimes brilliant disappointment. It delivers, in fact, a very good-to-excellent first act and a reasonably decent second act. But it commits hari-kiri in the third act, and in so doing destroys the initial good will that it had during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes. I’m truly sorry. My respect to Mr. Payne and his collaborators. Everybody drops the ball once in a while.

Here’s how I put it four and two thirds months ago (“Downsizing Deflates, Treads Water in Telluride”):

“Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

“The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

“The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act.)

As one who was nearly euphoric about that ten-minute clip from Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing that I saw five months ago at Cinemacon, it breaks my heart and drains my soul to report that this portion of Payne’s film is far and away the most engaging, and that the rest of it is…well, certainly original and fascinating and intriguing as far as it goes. But the film as a whole doesn’t score on a jackpot level.

Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22) came into Telluride like Leo the lion, fed by those high aggregate review scores out of the Venice Film Festival and those highly admiring reviews from Todd McCarthy and Owen Gleiberman, but things quickly turned quiet and gulpy after yesterday’s 2 pm screening at the Chuck Jones theatre. 

Right now I would call Downsizing a respected lamb that no one I’ve spoken to, and I mean no one, is truly over-the-moon about. Except for Todd McCarthy, I mean.  1:05 pm update:  An older woman I just spoke to in line called it “embarrassing.”  That’s too harsh!  What it does is under-deliver.

Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act. Read the McCarthy and Gleiberman reviews if you want specifics.)

I wanted a whipsmart social satire mixed with a sci-fi adventure about the exotic thrill of suddenly (and somewhat depressingly) being five inches tall and all that would entail, but what I got after the first act ended was a somewhat mopey, down-spirited love story between Damon and a spirited, peg-legged, often-hard-to-understand Vietnamese woman (Hong Chau) living in hand-to-mouth fashion and coping with total methane ruination of the planet.

I didn’t want a “love fuck” or a “pity fuck” (lines from the actual film) — I wanted a satirically funny excitement fuck, and that wasn’t what Payne was into when he wrote and directed.

I am not, however, “panning” Downsizing. It’s definitely a major, highly original, award-season release that everyone will have to see. It will be a huge topic of conversation during the late fall and holiday period. I am in no way saying “don’t see this” or “wait for streaming” or anything along those lines. 

Downsizing is smartly written, well acted, conceptually daring and dynamic and certainly an awesome technical achievement. It starts out as a kind of grandly visionary Preston Sturges-level social satire, then it downshifts into an occasionally amusing but sad-sacky relationship film, and then it turns soft and sappy and drearily humanistic in the final act. I never said to myself “I’m not admiring this” or “this is boring” — it’s definitely a first-rate film, and I’m very glad that Payne finally got it made — but I couldn’t get high off it. I tried but it wouldn’t let me.

From a 4.1.17 post titled “Middle Americans May Not Like What They See in Downsizing“, which riffed on my reactions to a 10-minute Downsizing clip shown at Cinemacon and particularly a conservative Arizona woman’s reaction to it:

“Yes, Downsizing is ‘comedic’ but a long way from lighthearted. For all the humor and cleverness and first-rate CG it feels kind of Twilight Zone-y…a kind of Rod Serling tale that will have an uh-oh finale or more likely an uh-oh feeling all through it. The undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

“A day after Cinemacon’s Downsizing presentation I was chatting with a bespectacled heavy-set female who works, she said, for an Arizona exhibitor (or some exhibition-related business) in some executive capacity. She struck me as a conservative, perhaps one who processes things in simplistic ‘like/no like’ terms, definitely not a Susan Sontag brainiac.

“I shared my impression that the Downsizing clip was brilliant, and asked what she thought of it. Her response: ‘I don’t know what I think of it.’

“HE translation: ‘No offense but I don’t want to spill my mixed feelings with some Los Angeles journalist I’ve just met. I didn’t like the chilly feeling underneath it. It didn’t make me feel good. My heart wasn’t warmed by the idea of working people shrinking themselves down so they can live a more lavish lifestyle. I have to work really hard at my job and watch my spending and build up my IRA, and I didn’t appreciate the notion that I’m just a little struggling hamster on a spinning wheel.'”

With today’s announcement that Alexander Payne’s Downsizing will open the 2017 Venice International Film Festival on 8.30, there’s a 95% chance that Payne and his cast (Matt Damon, Kirsten Wiig, Laura Dern, Christoph Waltz, Jason Sudeikis) will fly to the Telluride Film Festival a day or two later. In my recently posted Telluride spitball piece, I wrote that Downsizing looked like a nope — “Too late in the year, too much FX tweaking, too much finessing and re-editing.” And I was wrong. That happens from time to time.

After watching several minutes of footage from Downsizing last March at Cinemacon, I wrote that “the undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

Last Tuesday all the Cinemacon journos went apeshit after seeing ten minutes of footage from Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22), myself especially. Yes, it’s “comedic” but a long way from lighthearted. For all the humor and cleverness and first-rate CG it feels kind of Twilight Zone-y…a kind of Rod Serling tale that will have an uh-oh finale or more likely an uh-oh feeling all through it.

Last Tuesday I wrote that the undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

A day after the Downsizing presentation I was chatting with a bespectacled heavy-set female who works, she said, for an Arizona exhibitor (or some exhibition-related business) in some executive capacity. She struck me as a conservative, perhaps one who processes things in simplistic “like/no like” terms, definitely not a Susan Sontag brainiac. 

I told her that I thought Downsizing was brilliant and asked what she thought of it. Her response: “I don’t know what I think of it.”

HE translation: “No offense but I don’t want to spill my mixed feelings with some Los Angeles journalist I’ve just met. I didn’t like the chilly feeling underneath it. It didn’t make me feel good. My heart wasn’t warmed by the idea of working people shrinking themselves down so they can live a more lavish lifestyle. I have to work really hard at my job and watch my spending and build up my IRA, and I didn’t appreciate the notion that I’m just a little struggling hamster on a spinning wheel.”

Again — my initial reaction to the footage.

Filed on iPhone:  Paramount and Alexander Payne’s Cinemacon preview of Downsizing was awesome, brilliant, hilarious, sad and a tiny bit scary — an obvious Best Picture contender.

It’s well acted, earnest, scientifically palatable as far as it goes, emotionally honest, fascinating and darkly funny.  And the visual & practical effects are top-notch.  It’s going to be great — you can tell.

The title refers to shrinking people down to five inches, reducing their needs (less food, smaller houses and cars), expanding their purchasing power and generating a much, much smaller carbon footprint.  Makes sense, good move, your banker and accountant approve.

Downsizing is going to be the shit — I only saw ten minutes worth and I just knew. We all did. It was obvious.  A metaphor about totalitarianism, dehumanization, submission — it’s the new Metropolis.  Wow.

Payne’s Downsizing, George Clooney’s Coen-esque Suburbicon, Darren Aronofsky’s un-screened Mother, Alex Garland’s Annhilation   — Paramount’s four critical winners in ‘17, I’m thinking.  

Warner Bros. publicity managed to manipulate this Casablanca publicity still to make it seem as if Humphrey Bogart was heftier than costar Ingrid Bergman. No way was Bogart’s head this big compared to Bergman’s. The 5’9″ Bergman was actually taller than Bogart by two inches, and could have probably taken him in a wrestling match. The below group shot attempted an even more radical resizing.

(L. to r.) Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Bergman, Bogart.

I was too consumed by the Telluride Film Festival to pay attention to this 9.2 Boston Globe piece by Ty Burr, which is probably prescient. It basically reiterates that as the mass audience has become more and more ADD, ignorant and sloth-like, the culture of cool, intelligent, educated-viewer cinema, while generating steady if modest returns, is becoming a smaller and smaller aspect of the movie business — a kind of cafe-society culture.

This observation was echoed in a 9.5 Indiewire piece by Eric Kohn.

“This is where the cinema is headed as its more commercial iteration — we still call them blockbusters, although few blocks are busted nowadays — founders on creative bankruptcy and an audience that will inevitably move on to other forms of entertainment,” Burr wrote. “I called it the jazz-club metaphor in a column last week and the parallel holds: As the two-hour theatrical film falls slowly out of mainstream orbit, it becomes increasingly the province of a smaller but self-selected audience of movie-literate cognoscenti, old, young, and in between.

“The Oscar season caters to the broader end of that audience but no further: The last five best picture winners have averaged a comparatively paltry $65 million at the box office (the number falls to $47 million once you factor out Argo).

“Even those diehards are watching movies as part of a larger audio-visual diet that is in serious technological and cultural flux. I could easily say that Lemonade was the best movie I saw this spring and Stranger Things was the best movie I saw this summer, and if you reply that they’re not movies because they didn’t play in theaters or conform to a two-hour run time, I’d say you’re living in the past. The Hollywood studios still feel comfortable in that paradigm but they’re starting to look like the only ones. Maybe they’re the suicide squad.”

Mark Adnum, the Australian writer and editor of Outrate, has thoroughly explained why giving a Best Actress Oscar to Meryl Streep for Julie and Julia is a bad idea.

“Putting fandom and loyalty aside,” he writes, “does anyone really think that her performance in Julie and Julia is so great that it needs to be recognized with the same prize given to her work in Sophie’s Choice? Giving Streep an Oscar for a performance that can’t hold a candle to those that she deservedly won for — as Dustin Hoffman‘s unstable young wife in Kramer vs. Kramer and as the undead Auschwitz survivor who makes her ghostly way through a doomed new life in Sophie’s Choice — would only undermine her Oscar legacy.”

I’m sensing that the Streep yacht is taking on water and listing to the side. The sleek Mulligan sailfish, as Tony Curtis once said, is in “ship-ship-shape.” And the Bullock schooner — representing the Best Actress contender favored by hinterland women and their go-along husbands — is catching the big gusts.

An HE reader passed along some kind of official casting notice for a new Alexander Payne film called Downsizing. I’m going to assume that it has nothing overtly to do with cutting people from the payroll, but check out the topliners — Sacha Baron Cohen, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep and Reese Witherspoon. It’ll be cool if this cast comes together, although a very-close-to-the-action source says it’s a little early to say.

(l. to r.) Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep,. Sacha Baron Cohen.

“Nothing is locked down at this juncture, not even script, certainly not cast,” the source says. “[Payne is] still working on screenplay, although he’s close.” When the script is done and gets sent around, I’d very much like to read it. Naturally.

Here’s how the info looked as it came to me in the e-mail:

“DOWNSIZING (AKA UNTITLED ALEXANDER PAYNE PROJECT) (BL,RG)

D:Alexander Payne, CD:John Jackson, T:Sacha Baron Cohen, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon.”

The casting director is John Jackson, who served as casting director for Payne’s Sideways and worked in the casting department on three earlier Payne films — Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt.

If Downsizing is Payne’s next film I’m not sure where this leaves Fork in the Road, a Dublin-based romantic drama based on Dennis Hamill‘s 2000 book of the same name. The adaptation is by Kerry Williamson. The IMDB has Payne listed as director-producer.

Mission: Impossible: III “is likely to gross close to $400 million worldwide at the box office and is projected to earn an additional $200 million in DVD revenue…[and yet] Paramount expects only to break even after star-producer Tom Cruise gets his share of the profit, which two informed sources estimate could be as high as $80 million.” This according to Claudia Eller‘s 7.31 L.A.Times piece about the diminishing interest that Paramount has in cutting any more fat deals with Cruise and his ilk. Paramount recently offered Cruise/Wagner Prods. an annual $2 million budget, Eller reported, instead of the annual $10 million C/W had been authorized to spend before. The bottom line is that the days of big-dollar gross players are over.