Celine Song follows up her Oscar-nominated debut feature film, Past Lives, with another meditative look at modern romance. This time it’s Materialists, which takes the trappings of a romantic comedy and gently drops them into something almost like reality, where, specifically, financial reality is a critical part of everyone’s relationships. Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy—classic rom-com heroine name—a matchmaker celebrating success at her client’s wedding. There she meets the wealthy and dashing Harry (Pedro Pascal), who is immediately smitten with her. She also reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor working as a cater-waiter. Despite their years apart, John is not over Lucy.
In fact, everyone loves Lucy. Every man who even glimpses her on the street turns his head admiringly, those who actually talk to her fall in immediate love. Strutting through New York in an enviably chic wardrobe with a sense of cool detachment and icy sexiness, Dakota Johnson is a Millennial Gwyneth Paltrow, privileged and unattainable. As a person who grew up impoverished, as Lucy is supposed to be, Johnson is an absurd casting choice, any suggestion that this woman ever knew deprivation is abjectly unbelievable. But as an object of desire, she is completely believable, only an effortlessly stylish woman can make jeans and a button-down look that good. Lucy oozes style, if nothing else.
As for her suitors, John is rakish and charming, sincere and companionable, and flat-ass broke. He’s forty and still trying to make his childhood acting dream happen, clinging to the hope that this time he’ll catch his big break (via a play). I know there are very successful actors who didn’t get their big break until later in life, but if a forty-year-old man working as a cater-waiter and living with multiple roommates told me he wants to be an actor, I, too, would hesitate to hitch my wagon to that man. Which is the whole point of Materialists, Lucy, sick of being poor, is determined to “marry rich”. She let go of her own acting dream, ditched John, and got her upwardly mobile matchmaking job which leads to her Harry, whose main attraction is being Pedro Pascal.
On paper, Harry is a perfect match—handsome, rich, sophisticated, and sharing in Lucy’s transactional view of romance. Harry is SO perfect on paper, in fact, especially as a potential mate for a forty-ish woman looking for stability, that Pascal’s role feels significantly edited down, as if someone realized that if we spend too much time with him, there is no amount of Chris Evans looking soulful that is going to make not picking Harry seem like a reasonable choice. Harry is who you pick in your forties! John is who you date in your twenties, and at forty, he is still that guy. Harry, meanwhile, has his sh-t together. Alas, Lucy is seized by a realization that maybe the love part of romance matters after all.
Again, this is what Materialists is all about, the tension between the impracticality of love and all the practical considerations of life, and what of those considerations attraction and desire can overcome, and what concerns remain after the headiness of falling in love fades. And for the most part, Song handles that tension with her now trademark thoughtfulness and a wry sense of humor (undoubtedly bolstered by her experience working for a professional matchmaker in her twenties). However, Song can’t quite manage the tonal shift between Lucy’s romantical problems and the plight of Sophie (Zoë Winters), a longtime client turned sort-of friend unlucky in love.
Lucy matches Sophie with Mark (John Magaro), who sexually assaults Sophie. Lucy is stricken when she learns this, and Sophie accuses her of carelessly assigning her match just to get it done and ends their semi-friendship. Winters is fantastic in the role, but Sophie’s subplot does not mesh with the rest of Materialists at all. It feels like a completely different film thrust into the middle of an otherwise reflective romantic drama about money and love. It’s not that the Sophie plot can’t work in that context, it’s just that it doesn’t work as is. It feels like Materialists needed a little more time in the hopper for Song to fully blend Sophie’s story into Lucy’s, so that the two elements don’t grate so badly on one another.
In Materialists, Celine Song takes the tropes of a rom-com and applies a layer of reality to it. For the most part, it works. All the right pieces are on the board, but they’re hastily assembled. The result is a film that looks great (lensed by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner) and features some great performances—Chris Evans rarely gets a chance to be this good—but that ultimately falls flat. I hesitate to call it a sophomore slump for Celine Song, because it’s still better than 80% of movies made, but Materialists doesn’t reach the same level of empathy and understanding as Past Lives. It’s too uneven and tonally jarring. For all that it pokes at Deep Thoughts, Materialists is as shallow as Lucy.
Materialists is now playing exclusively in theaters.
