“After Sideways I had hoped this would be my next movie” says multi Golden Globe nominated and winner Alexander Payne – visibly elated to be in Venice and exhibiting his flawless accents in the Italian and Spanish words he interspersed liberally in the talk he had with HFPA journalists in the Excelsior hotel’s beautiful Sala Stucchi.

As Hollywood would have it that was not to be, as development purgatory (and the shooting of The Descendants and Nebraska) pushed back the completion of Downsizing for more than ten years. Payne mentions that it was not easy to sell studios on the movie’s unconventional premise, and credits the late Brad Grey at Paramount for finally helping nudge the production along. Now the film that he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Jim Taylor has opened Venice 2017.

Alexander Payne and Hog Chau meet HFPA at 74th Venice Film Festival

Luca Celada/HFPA

Downsizing can best be described as a fantasy-satire. Given the premise in which people are able to shrink to a height of five inches with a simple medical procedure, comparisons to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are perhaps inevitable, but other films like Being John Malkovich or The Truman Show also come to mind. The premise and tone of the first part of the film are the most whimsical, perhaps, in Payne’s oeuvre, but there is time for twists and turns and a plot that is customarily about the characters, as well as many allegories to our real world of class, consumerism, discrimination and apocalyptic angst: as Matt Damon put it to the HFPA, here it turns out “no matter what size we are, when we get small we bring all our problems with us.”

Kristen Wiig and Matt Damon pose, then meet with HFPA at 74th Venice Film Festival

Luca Celada/HFPA

One of the true pleasures of the film is the work done by the cast, which apart from Damon as harried Omaha occupational therapist Paul Safranek, includes Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis, Neil Patrick Harris, Christoph Waltz, Udo Kier, Laura Dern and breakout Hong Chau.