Richard Brody shared a link.
Also,
a word on Downsizing, in which Alexander Payne deploys his formidable art of
the salient detail for a sprawling story that's three films in one (a mediocre
one, a terrific one, and a terrible one), and in which his clever vision and
bold idea are smothered in homilies; it's well worth seeing, because what's
good is memorable, but for much of the time, it isn't much of an experience—it
remains a blueprint.
https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-outsized-pleasures-and-fail…
https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-outsized-pleasures-and-fail…
Payne
engages effervescently in the art of world-building, but then yields to a
self-satisfied moralism.
NEWYORKER.COM
Anthony Salvatore I love Alexander
Payne, Downsizing did not disappoint. I don’t care what people say.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Anu Partanen,
a Finnish author, moved to New York and was immediately pleased by America's
diversity, lacking in all-white Finland. That ends up being about the only kind
thing she says about the place, however, as Finland's environmentally conscious
populace, readily imagined as Payne imagines these Norwegians, really are
simply better (she even challenges the idea that America's got an edge in
nurturing entrepreneurialism, making the solid point that in Finland the safety
net is secure enough that you never have to cling to job or family for security
and therefore aren't as inclined to placate and play safe). They put themselves
above working class "trash" (everyone in their community gives the
sense of being highly educated and a specialist of some technology, even as
hidden by their folkish outward tastes) -- though never of course political
refugees, of any kind, whom they seek out and salute -- and this is a nasty
thing. But it's important that the voice in the film that refutes them, refutes
their purity and likens them to all humanity in being pretty fundamentally
flawed -- specifically, violent -- shouldn't seem to us more likely to be wise
unless we are naturally inclined to locate wisdom in characters who admit
they're compromised and can at times be severely sketchy. Maybe however that is
Payne's thing ("Election" comes to mind too, as some have seen the
film as a takedown of Hillary Clinton-types, and revenge against them too). As
I remember it, that's very Goethe.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston What I mean by
this is that the Norwegians in this film are portrayed as people sort of
abstract to the working class people they don't seem to mind all that much if a
natural scientific phenomena means most of them slide off the planet. This is
the populist view of the educated, liberal professional class. The criticism is
apt; really has to be noted. Our problem is that almost no one who seems to
notice it really convinces as actually being better than they are. It's like
their ego is allowed some avenues of absolute sanity -- where they see things
more clearly than any other (the rightwing can do this too at times: read their
sometimes more accurate views of anthropology, which, as Steven Pinker has
noted, is still full of romanticized portrayals) -- but outside these
"zones" are people embedded in the madness that people are flawed and
sinful, that misery will never be eradicated out of the world, and that
everyone who believes different is a menace to the earth. The people who note
the meanness in today's environmentalists don't do sufficient due to their
righteous optimism and warmth, and are themselves the rearguard, the
conservatives that emerge at times hoping to shut everything down.
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