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.

I was a Paul Schrader devotee for decades, but about ten years ago he went off the rails. Dominion (that Exorcist prequel), The Walker (Woody Harrelson, no energy), Adam Resurrected, The Canyons (Lindsay Lohan!), The Dying of the Light and especially Dog Eat Dog…what happened, brah?

But now he’s back with First Reformed, a spare, Bresson-like, thoroughly gripping piece about despair, environmental ruin, moral absolutism and sexual-emotional redemption that’s completely rational and meditative and yet half crazy. But a good kind.

On top of which it’s been shot in a 1.66 aspect ratio, which itself is cause for modest celebration.

I watched it late last night on my 15″ Macbook Pro, and I felt truly surprised and taken aback the whole way through. Well, almost the whole way as the ending doesn’t quite work. But I can’t over-emphasize how amazing it feels to watch a fully felt, disciplined, well–ordered film by a brilliant guy who had seemingly lost his way or gone into eclipse, only to be startled when he leaps out from behind the curtain and says “Hah…I never left!” 

But you did leave, Paul. You really did. I was driven crazy by Dog Eat Dog, but now you’re Lazarus. 

First Reformed is so Schraderian, so moralistic in almost a Travis Bickle kind of way, so tortured and yet fully engrossing. Everyone has been calling it Taxi Driver meets Diary of a Country Priest with a little Hardcore and Rolling Thunder thrown in.

Set in upstate New York, it’s Reverent Toller (Ethan Hawke), an ex-military chaplain turned small-town minister, who gradually succumbs to the idea — don’t laugh or recoil — of moral absolutism by way of becoming a suicide bomber. 

The cause is environmental ruin, and for the agnostics or ignoramuses in the audience Schrader makes the case (as if anyone needed convincing) that what’s happening to the planet right now is a great Biblical sin, and that we can’t just sit on the sidelines and say to ourselves, “Well, maybe the seas won’t rise as fast as scientists are predicting.”

I’m not going to summarize the plot minus the final beat, like all reviewers do. I hate doing that plus I have to attend the Telluride brunch. Better to just see First Reformed and let it happen.

Here’s what I wrote this morning to a friend: “Schrader’s best since Affliction. Or maybe even since Hardcore, which opened 38 years ago.

“It’s an unmistakable echo of Taxi Driver in a way — pondering an act of moral absolutism that will ‘wipe away all of the filth off the streets’ or words to that effect.

“I was riveted all through it. You can see where it’s going early on, and it holds you in its grip. That first-act conversation with that despairing environmental activist, the bearded husband of Amanda Seyfried, is really great.

“I didn’t expect a ‘happy’ ending, one that delivers sex and redemption and a kind of Seyfried cleansing, but that’s what it does. I don’t think it works, but the sexual levitation dreamscape scene does work.

“I thought the Schrader who made this, the Schrader who made Hardcore and American Gigolo and Blue Collar, had died and left the earth. But he’s still here and just as focused and well-honed and certain of purpose.

“So lean, spare, spartan. So sure of itself, so planted. The camera never moving. I think the aspect ratio is 1.66.

“Ethan Hawke…wow. Right on it, the right mood and tone. I believed every word, every expression. And the natural, unforced way that Seyfried occupies her character and task, and Cedric the Entertainer, who was so great in the Coen brothers Uncommon Cruelty or whatever it was called, and Michael Gaston ‘s right-wing industrialist who doesn’t want politics to be part of the 250th anniversary celebration of Hawke’s First Reformed church.”

Richard Anderson, a dependably solid character actor who understood how to play middle-class professional types grappling with moral failure, is dead at 90. To hell with his work in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. When I think of Anderson, I go right to Paths of Glory (in which he played the unctuous Major Sant-Auuban), then to Seven Days in May (another military officer, this time kowtowing to Burt Lancaster) and finally to Play It As It Lays, in which he played one of Tuesday Weld‘s lovers, albeit one who feels anguish when she tells him she’s aborted their child.

I have to check out of my Aztec motel in less than an hour, but with the Telluride Film Festival slate finally announced, the following are HE must-sees:

ARTHUR MILLER: WRITER (d. Rebecca Miller, U.S., 2017); BATTLE OF THE SEXES (d. Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton, U.S., 2017); DARKEST HOUR (d. Joe Wright, U.K., 2017); DOWNSIZING (d. Alexander Payne, U.S., 2017); A FANTASTIC WOMAN (d. Sebastián Lelio, Chile-U.S.-Germany-Spain, 2017); FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL (d. Paul McGuigan, U.K., 2017); HOSTILES (d. Scott Cooper, U.S., 2017); LADY BIRD (d. Greta Gerwig, U.S., 2017); THE RIDER (d. Chloé Zhao, U.S., 2017); THE SHAPE OF WATER (d. Guillermo del Toro, U.S., 2017)…ten in all.

I’d like to see others, of course, but the odds aren’t good. Then again Telluride always does a brilliant job of programming must-sees against each other so maybe I’ll miss one or two. Leaving for Telluride now. The drive will take three hours or thereabouts.

Nothing says small-town, Norman Rockwell America and down-home humanistic values like corporate chain stores and the constant howl of traffic. Welcome to hell, which in this instance is Aztec, New Mexico. I crashed here last night and I’m still hanging around, sitting in a McDonald’s and grappling with wifi speeds that are slower than a horse trader’s mule. Massive parking lots, too much light, 24-hour gas stations, noise, corporate signage, limited incomes and a sense of being inside a minimum-security prison. If I was forced to live here I would become an opioid addict in less than a month.

Two days after it became apparent that the Toronto Film festival had added Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq. to the lineup, the festival has finally this. Take your time, guys!

From the release: “The Toronto International Film Festival® proudly announces the World Premiere of Academy Award® nominee Dan Gilroy’s Roman J. Israel, Esq., completing the 2017 Official Programme Selection. Written and directed by Gilroy and featuring an amazing transformation by Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. is the newest and final addition to TIFF’s Special Presentations programme, furthering Washington and Gilroy’s collaborative relationship with the Festival.”

A couple of days ago I was chatting with a colleague about the film, and he was wondering what was up with Denzel’s Don King haircut and purple Superfly suit. “Is it a period thing?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I suspect not. You have to figure there are older guys who dress like Don King because it means something to them…it’s a statement they value.” Update: Apparently it is a period thing.

Aztec, New Mexico, 7:11 am: No Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes scores yet for Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, but reviews from the Telegraph‘s Robbie Collin, Guardian‘s Xan Brooks and The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang will do for now.

The 12.8 Fox Searchlight release screened this morning at the Venice Film Festival, and of course will play this weekend in Telluride.

Collin #1: “The Shape of Water…is an honest-to-God B-movie blood-curdler that’s also, somehow, a shimmeringly earnest and boundlessly beautiful melodrama: think Creature From the Black Lagoon directed by Douglas Sirk.”

Collin #2: “It offers what must be cinema’s uneasiest probing of the postwar American psyche since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master — and is unquestionably del Toro’s best, richest film since his 2006 Spanish-language masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth. Crucially, it’s also one that he and he alone could have dreamt up.”

Brooks #1: “I’ve been agnostic about Del Toro in the past — filing the Mexican filmmaker away as an ideas man; a director who shoots for the moon only to fall slightly short. But I really liked The Shape of Water. It feels less of a fevered artistic exercise than his other recent work; more seamless and successful in the way it orders its material.”

Brooks #2: “Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.”

Collin #3: “Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.”

Kiang #1: “But as much as it has on its mind, it has even more in its happy-sad, brave and quiet heart. Without a single weak link in the exceptional cast (Sally Hawkins would deserve awards recognition if all she did was that one, unmistakably post-coital smile of carnal satisfaction in her lover’s scaly embrace), it’s a film that makes you feel a lot.

Kiang #2: “But overridingly you feel lucky — lucky to be watching it, lucky that something so sincerely sweet, sorrowfully scary and surpassingly strange can exist in this un-wonderful world, and desirous of hanging on to as much of its magic for as long as you can after you reemerge back onto dry land.”

Blade Runner 2049 runs two hours and 32 minutes sans credits, and two hours and 43 minutes with them. 152 + 11 minutes of credits = 163. Right off the bat I’ve got an attitude about this. Imagine da coolness if Denis Villeneuve’s semi-sequel ran 100 minutes or thereabouts. If Steven Soderbergh is reading, please consider one of your re-edits down the road. How long does the closing credit sequence last in Ridley Scott’s 1982 original, which runs 117 minutes? How minutes of actual screen time does Harrison Ford have in Denis Villeneuve’s semi-sequel or whatever you wanna call it? 20 or 15? Just asking. Warner Bros. opens it on 10.6.

I’m sorry but I’m in Phoenix, where the temperature is 107. The Albuquerque flight leaves at 4:50 pm, arrives an hour later. Dollar rent-a-car, three-hour drive to Aztec, flop at local dive. Aztec to Telluride will eat about three and 1/2 hours, give or take.

Houston sea, complete with waves and whitecaps.

Snapped in Venice.

Gate C7, Phoenix airport, 4:15 pm.

Hold your ground, be cool, take it like a man.

The new trailer for Lynn Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here, based on the novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames. Pic stars Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman and Judith Roberts. It premiered at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, where Ramsay won the Best Screenplay award and Phoenix won the Best Actor award. It’s a forthcoming Amazon release, running 85 minutes.

From Kyle Buchanan’s 5.27 Joaquin Phoenix interview, titled “Joaquin Phoenix Is an Action Hero Now, But He’s Keeping His Belly“: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here is about a hammer-wielding, battle-scarred war veteran who rescues girls from a sex-trafficking ring, but you’ll know it’s different from a traditional action thriller as soon as star Joaquin Phoenix takes off his shirt.

“In an era where most leading men have awfully similar buff bodies, the 42-year-old Phoenix stands apart: His character is covered in scars, his pecs are hardly Hollywood-chiseled, and while the actor hit the gym every day to build strong arms for the role, he’s still got a notable gut hanging over his waistband. If there’s any six-pack in sight, it’s likely getting cold in the fridge.