Downsizing (4½ Stars)

If you've ever been to a Chinese restaurant in America you know about those funny little things they give you after the meal called fortune cookies. They're horrible tasting sweet biscuits which contain a strip of paper with a message. This message might be a prediction of what will happen to you, or it might be a wise statement. When I visited a Chinese restaurant with work colleagues in Poughkeepsie, New York, I found a message that I'll never forget:

"The man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest".

It didn't mean much to me at the time, but I'm glad I didn't forget it, because a few years later it become my life motto. After having a large income for more than 20 years my career collapsed and I earned less than 20% of what I'd had before. But it was enough. I realised that I could make do with my smaller income by being happy with less. I didn't have a car. I never went on holidays. I rarely ate out. My only luxuries were a good computer and a good stereo system, and even they were bought carefully after tight budgeting. Now, after spending 15 years getting by with limited resources I don't want to return to the days of having too much money.

Many people don't understand me because this way of thinking is so alien to them. Many don't believe me when I say I'm not interested in acquiring money. My brother-in-law, a very greedy man by nature, has repeatedly accused me of wanting to get my hands on the family inheritance. He's projecting his own faults onto me, but even people with greater moral integrity think in similar ways. The opposite is the truth. If I somehow won a million dollars today my first thought would be to divide it among my children, keeping only enough for my basic needs for the rest of my life.

That's what "Downsizing" is about. Paul Safranek is a man who learns to live a life of virtual luxury by reducing his size and reducing his needs. Then he loses the little he has left when his greedy wife divorces him, but he still manages to survive. He finds pleasure in things that don't cost money.

I'm pleased that this film is already included in Amazon Prime, less than a year after it appeared in the cinema. Maybe that's because it was a box office failure. That's a shame. It's a film that deserves to be watched, and it's a film that should make you reassess your life and your goals.

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