It begins with disappointing sex. The opening scene of 1996’s scathing satire Citizen Ruth – Alexander Payne’s debut film – has Laura Dern enduring an uncomfortable episode in a seedy bedroom before being flung into a hallway.
Later, pregnant, but oblivious, she’s sick on a police car. It’s a reliable introduction to Payne’s world: ordinary people stumbling through life, crashing into revelation. Payne once called commercial American cinema an “abomination”, and since the start he has been peeling back the curtain.
Payne’s people are often stubbornly stuck in behavioural ruts and routines. They are cantankerous, like Paul Giamatti’s uptight wine snob Miles in Sideways; misguided, like George Clooney’s deluded dad Matt King in The Descendants; unhinged, when their moral compass is knocked off course, like Election’s teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who suffers an unending meltdown, cursed to live forever in denial.
Payne’s new film, Downsizing, tackles a crisis of masculinity head on. Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) works as an occupational therapist in a meat factory and, struggling to make his wife happy, undertakes a scientific shrinking process in search of an absurdly idealised life. Cue the existentialism.
Disappointment is never far away in Payne’s films, as careers, relationships and hopes slip away. These are not stock characters, not easily defined. They live between the lines. Things have not gone according to plan.
In Sideways, Miles is an awful drunk who steals from his mother. Insufferable and self-absorbed, he is hideously pretentious; from the moment he orders a spinach croissant, we know what we’re in for, let alone his vendetta against merlot. Bitter and broken, he needs to be fixed, but is incapable of doing it on his own – yet we bleed for him.
We can all be insufferable and selfish – and Payne throws a light on that. “We’re all trying to wake up in this brief flash of life on this planet, unless we’re complete idiots,” Payne told the Guardian in 2012. “I root for these characters to grow and wake up, the way I root for myself to grow and wake up.”
Payne’s characters are especially effective because they seem so real, regardless of their various exaggerations. Warren Schmidt, the crabby insurance guy with a comb-over from About Schmidt, was played by an uncharacteristically dialled-down Jack Nicholson.
Payne told the Washington Post that, for reassurance before the cameras rolled, his production designer gave him some advice on how to handle an acting legend. “Remember, he might be fillet,” she said, “but he’s still a piece of meat.”
Nicholson found himself acting against people who had never acted before, and likely never will again – Payne populated the film with natives from his “beloved” home state of Nebraska, contributing unmistakable authenticity to the environments.
He does this often, heightening reality by rounding outcasts with non-actors, people doing on camera exactly what they’d be doing off it – drinking at bars, waitressing in diners. As a leveller, he’ll ask the seasoned actors to underplay it, minimising the contrast.
Nebraska from 2013 was full of locals. The film feels like a tapestry, a tribute to the people there. “I always wanted to see Nebraskans on film, as though the people I know here matter,” Payne told Nebraska Life magazine. “Because I believe they do.”
Payne’s films are about a real America and its inhabitants – not a movie America, not the landmarks. “Okay, we’ve seen it,” says Bruce Dern’s no-nonsense Woody Grant in Payne’s film Nebraska, dismissing Mount Rushmore after being dragged to see it, taking in the view for mere seconds. The film is a black and white paean to the land: the beauty of it, the simplicity, and a window into how the economy has torn towns apart.
Payne’s worlds are ordinary, often tatty around the edges, lending a vivid sense of space. The Descendants appealed to him, he said, because he was eager to see Honolulu in a film, to capture its “decaying aristocracy” in a story, while Downsizing jumps from Paul’s uninspiring home to Norway’s thrilling fjords.
In both films Payne juxtaposes natural beauty with his characters’ existential heartache. Such geography is integral, the result of Payne spending weeks before each film searching for authentic locations with his production designers, often knocking on doors and asking if he can film there.
These details are everything. In Sideways, when Miles has a day to himself and buys a copy of Barely Legal magazine from a shop’s top shelf, we learn too much too quickly just in the way he says: “No, the new one”. It is at once pathetic and funny, just like when he glugs a bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc that he’s been saving for “a special occasion with the right person”, on his own in a two-bit cafe, in his tuxedo, as his world falls apart.
This is major climatic Armageddon in a Payne film – a little heartbreak, the end of hope, before the dark clouds part. We’ve all been there. Not quite there maybe, but near enough.
Yet these films are funny. The middle-aged man making all the wrong decisions, Payne told the Guardian, is his comic archetype. Above all the musing, philosophising and attempts at connection, it’s knockabout comedy. Woody Grant’s sons on a revenge mission, stealing an air compressor from the wrong older people. Jim McAllister getting stung in the eye by a bee. Miles sprinting back to the car after retrieving his adulterous friend’s wallet from an angry naked man. Somebody usually gets punched in the face.
Payne zeroes in on sorrow and introspection. He serves up a succession of dead dreams, giving us permission to laugh at the tragedy of it all, then well up at the kindness, the love and catharsis.
In Downsizing, Paul finds himself having to re-evaluate his life goals, finding new perspective. The world isn’t quite set to rights in Payne’s films, but his people get a little piece of pie – an old man driving through town in the truck he’s always wanted, a knock on a door promising new life. Everyday beats of everyday lives.
In 2014, Payne spoke to Variety about downtown Omaha, where he still lives, commenting that people on the coast “sometimes smirk at” it, he said. “But everywhere is exotic and everything is beautiful if you look at it long enough and with the right generosity of spirit.”
Downsizing is out in cinemas on the following dates: 22 December (Spain), 26 December (Australia), 10 January (France), 18 January (Germany), 25 January (Italy), 26 January (UK).
