DOWNSIZING | FAMILY MOVIE REVIEW INFORMATION FOR PARENTS AND KIDS

"DOWNSIZING"
(2017) (Matt Damon, Hong Chau) (R)

QUICK TAKE:: Sci-Fi Drama: A man finds his life changed forever when he voluntarily goes through a procedure that reduces him down to just five inches tall.

PLOT:

Paul (MATT DAMON) and Audrey Safranek (KRISTEN WIIG) are an ordinary couple leading an ordinary life in Omaha, Nebraska where Paul works as an occupational therapist. While at an alumni party, they're shocked to see former classmates who've been downsized. Not in the corporate sense, but in the physical one where a process invented by Dr. Jorgen AsbJornsen (ROLF LASSGARD) a decade earlier has allowed them and others to be shrunken down to just a few inches tall.

Not only is this good for the world that's becoming overpopulated and with increasingly limited resources, but also for those who opt for the irreversible procedure in that living small equates to equally diminished living expenses, be that related to clothing, food or mansions that can be built for pennies on the dollar due to their diminutive size in the real world.

After serious consideration and a visit to a miniature planned community known as Leisureland, the Safraneks decide to get downsized. But when Paul wakes up from the procedure, he's shocked to learn that Audrey backed out at the last moment and won't ever be joining him.

A year later, they're divorced and Paul has given up the mansion for apartment living, although the wild parties thrown by his upstairs playboy neighbor, Dusan Mirkovic (CHRISTOPH WALTZ), and that man's party pal, Joris Konrad (UDO KIER), are increasingly irritating him. But they encourage Paul to party with them, he agrees, and wakes up the next morning to see Dusan's cleaning crew arrive. Among them is Ngoc Lan Tran (HONG CHAU), a Vietnamese woman who was shrunken against her will by her government for staging protests and whose ill-fitting prosthetic leg draws Paul's attention.

He offers to help her with that, but when it accidentally breaks, he's forced to assist her with her daily rounds of helping others, be that a terminally ill woman in her tenement type apartment outside the towering walls of Leisureland, or feeding those in need. As he continues interacting with her, Paul begins to develop a different view of the world and his place in it.

WILL KIDS WANT TO SEE IT?: The unique sci-fi story angle might draw in some, while fans of the filmmaker or those in the cast might entice others as well.

WHY THE MPAA RATED IT: R: For language including sexual references, some graphic nudity and drug use.

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