Downsizing

DOWNSIZING   **1/2

Alexander Payne

2017

IDEA:  In the near future, a technology exists that gives humans the ability to shrink themselves down to five inches, allowing them to live luxuriously while reducing their carbon footprints. Unsurprisingly, the seemingly utopian idea has major pitfalls.

BLURB:  Downsizing exemplifies a kind of original, earnest social message movie currently in short supply in Hollywood, backed by an equally rare conceptual ambition. There is something admirable and refreshing about the unfussy directness of its appeals for altruism, civil responsibility, and environmental consciousness at a time when those things seem to matter more than ever, delivered through a compelling science-fiction scenario that sees hope in human endeavor even as it concedes that our destructive tendencies will, in all likelihood, decimate the planet and possibly the human race. If anything is disappointing about Payne’s film, it’s how ultimately attenuated his speculative (mini)world feels. Logistics and political nuances are more or less abandoned in favor of the film’s broad-strokes metaphor, which considers the wider implications of “downsizing” without really accounting for the operations of the universe in which it takes place. Perhaps inevitably, the myriad rich possibilities of the idea remain largely unexplored, reducing the film to a somewhat gauche tale of a (white, male) individual’s moral education, with an occasional adherence to archetypes that verges on the uncomfortable. Hong Chau at least assuages some of the sourness. Playing the film’s most complex and well-rounded character, the actress makes Ngoc Lan Tran a woman of vital, agential fortitude who resists categorization as either noble victim or enlightened redeemer, and she provides the film with a verisimilitude lacking in its more facile machinations. If it weren’t for her, Downsizing’s clarion call might’ve sounded more like a hollow echo.

The Shape of Water

THE SHAPE OF WATER   ***

Guillermo del Toro

2017

IDEA:  A mute janitor forms a relationship with a mysterious sea creature being detained at the government research facility where she works.

BLURB:  Like its protagonists, who learn how to live by imitating, internalizing, and becoming cinema, The Shape of Water constitutes an act of mimesis. In ornate fashion, del Toro frames his film as a film, proudly and affectionately emulating the styles and tropes of the classical Hollywood cinema that has fueled his creative passion. The result is a gleaming mash note that pays homage to a variety of genres in an exuberant if unevenly imagined pastiche. In any case, it is unmistakably the work of del Toro’s puckish mind: the writer-director suffuses the generic conventions of his scenarios with a macabre, oddball wit and artist’s attention to visual detail that tend to mitigate the more predictable aspects of his and Vanessa Taylor’s script. What is most delightful, although under-realized, is their mobilization of genre toward (lightly) subversive ends. The monster movie, the romantic melodrama, and the musical become refigured as vehicles for social outcasts, centering and ennobling the kinds of characters who have been historically excluded from the house styles that so enamor del Toro. This would have been more convincing, however, if The Shape of Water itself were more unorthodox. Despite its poignant foregrounding of those marginalized others, it remains stubbornly beholden to the trappings of genre and classical narrative structure, brushing over some of its most outré sensibilities with a factory sheen. Even the wondrously weird interspecies romance, ostensibly the ballast of the film, is overshadowed by busy and routine storytelling mechanics. The Shape of Water is not the sui generis film fantasia it could have been, but it is an endearing, exceedingly well-crafted entertainment that takes after its influences with an infectious conviction.

Coco

COCO   ***1/2

Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina

2017

IDEA:  When Miguel is transported to the Land of the Dead after feeling stifled by his family's age-old ban on music, he sets out to find his musician great-great-grandfather and uncover the truth of his heritage.

BLURB:  Coco is so overflowing with heart, energy, ingenuity, and rich cultural detail manifested in dazzlingly intricate audiovisual detail, its scene-by-scene effects are intoxicating. Never mind that it hardly counts among the crispest or most elegant storytelling in the Pixar canon – the film achieves its formidable power through its deeply realized, tangible evocation of Mexican traditions expressed in a celebratory riot of color, music, and pathos. Coco feels like a homegrown product, not an American studio film appropriating cultural signifiers or exoticizing from an imperialist distance, and this makes all the difference. Its effulgent depiction of Día de los Muertos emphasizes not only the spectacular festivity of the holiday but its central importance as a cornerstone of ancestral memory, as an honor to loved ones who have died, but have not been lost. By embroidering song so pervasively into its genealogical journey, the film testifies to music as one of the preeminent channels for memory, along with the photographic arts that also so preoccupy the story. Coco adds the medium of animation to that mnemonic group. All of its myriad loving representations – quilted into a tapestry that unites folklore and 20th-century art with the narrative logic of telenovelas – blaze across opulently designed frames, their essences transmitted to us just as decorated ofrendas and musical heirlooms summon absent people and places. At a certain point, Coco’s overstuffed plot and compulsory heartstring-tugging begin to feel less like symptoms of a kids’-film formula and more like signs of a culture’s vibrant, uncontainable spirit.