B+Directed by Celine Song Starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal Review by Jon Kissel |  |
After her directorial debut, the bittersweet romance Past Lives, Celine Song sticks with the genre with Materialists, a film with all the bitter of Past Lives and very little of the sweet. A film for the immediate present, Materialists lives in the sick dating world of 1% Manhattanites, where every relationship is about opportunity cost and happiness is only conceivable through appearances. Women over 30 are persona non grata, and no one has an honest appraisal of their own value in the dating pool. Song’s poison-pill drama conjures a world where everyone is in a hell of their own making, but they look great simmering in the lake of fire.
In her best role, Dakota Johnson stars Lucy, an elite matchmaker whose great talent is that she can hear the worst thing about her clients and not recoil. This skill allows her to fine-tune her placements, but it also makes her cynical and utilitarian about her own life. In her own view of herself, she’s an attractive-enough woman with modest education and a salary in the high five figures, which marks her as unworthy of anyone in the same class as the people who hire her. In reality, she looks like Dakota Johnson, an actor I’ve never found believable until Materialists and someone who would turn the eye of Pedro Pascal’s Harry, a wealthy ‘unicorn’ in Lucy’s description, that Lucy she meets at a wedding. Despite her protestations that he should be dating someone in his tax bracket, Harry finds her irresistible. At that same wedding, Lucy also runs into her old boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor who cater-waiters to pay the bills on an apartment he shares with two disgusting men. In flashbacks, the viewer sees that Lucy and John broke up because she couldn’t keep arguing about valet fees that they could barely afford. Someone like Harry has transcended those worries and can give Lucy what she holds up the most; the feeling that you are valuable.
The film is about Lucy, but is otherwise filled with characters sure that they’re the star of their own romantic comedy. The act of signing up for Lucy’s services will, at best, lead to the kind of wedding like the one where Lucy meets Harry, but the viewer is in the room with Lucy and the bride when the latter confesses her sick, doomed reasons for the marriage. If the best to be hoped for is the smugness and superiority of the bride’s innermost thoughts, what is the point of any of this? Within that world, a world that Song loves to accentuate with anti-Harry Met Sally montages of Lucy’s clients, Song constructs a love triangle, that hoariest of romance tropes made hoarier still by the difference in the financial situations of the male counterparts. Materialists asks if something so well-trodden can still exist, not only between these three specific people, but in an environment that serves up endless choices, or at least the possibility of endless choices.
Lucy’s clients clumsily define themselves, but Song knows exactly who Lucy, Harry, and John are. Lucy’s intelligence manifests in overthinking, in defining everyone she meets as a checklist of assets, liabilities, and the subsequent motivations to accentuate or mask them. In evaluating herself, she’s found herself lacking, something Harry or John find difficult to imagine. Lucy works with rich people, but not on Harry’s level, where there’s no need for pursuit because everything comes to him. Pascal embodies placidity but not complacency, an untouchable nature that comes from the elimination of stakes from his life. His internal thermostat never moves, because why should it? In contrast, John is weighed down by his stakes. Evans is allowed to retain his movie star looks because his character is an actor, but there’s a level of unhappiness on him that’s potent enough to dull his Captain America charm. John is exhausted and wounded and self-hating, and it’s impressive when a guy who looks like Evans can be credibly pathetic. In such a role, there’s the unavoidable question of how John can compete with Harry, and the film’s success rests on how believable that competition is. Between Song and Evans, for this viewer, they succeed.
Materialists is no unicorn itself, as it’s hampered by an assault subplot involving Lucy’s clients. The fake, ugly world of Lucy’s career doesn’t need to interfere with the more meaningful world of Lucy’s personal life. Instead, Lucy gets way too involved with the assault’s aftermath, skulking around in a trench coat to the point that Song had to know that her film was taking a turn towards the ridiculous. Nothing is learned in this subplot that isn’t unearthed within the love triangle, and the omission of the whole thing would lead to a better film. Nevertheless, Materialists is another strong entry from Song, and features some of the best work of its cast. If a part of cinema is taking the viewer to places they’ll never experience, the Manhattan dating scene gets checked off the list of abysmal hellholes alongside other dreadful places like WWII’s Eastern Front or a Thatcherite mining town. B+
The film is about Lucy, but is otherwise filled with characters sure that they’re the star of their own romantic comedy. The act of signing up for Lucy’s services will, at best, lead to the kind of wedding like the one where Lucy meets Harry, but the viewer is in the room with Lucy and the bride when the latter confesses her sick, doomed reasons for the marriage. If the best to be hoped for is the smugness and superiority of the bride’s innermost thoughts, what is the point of any of this? Within that world, a world that Song loves to accentuate with anti-Harry Met Sally montages of Lucy’s clients, Song constructs a love triangle, that hoariest of romance tropes made hoarier still by the difference in the financial situations of the male counterparts. Materialists asks if something so well-trodden can still exist, not only between these three specific people, but in an environment that serves up endless choices, or at least the possibility of endless choices.
Lucy’s clients clumsily define themselves, but Song knows exactly who Lucy, Harry, and John are. Lucy’s intelligence manifests in overthinking, in defining everyone she meets as a checklist of assets, liabilities, and the subsequent motivations to accentuate or mask them. In evaluating herself, she’s found herself lacking, something Harry or John find difficult to imagine. Lucy works with rich people, but not on Harry’s level, where there’s no need for pursuit because everything comes to him. Pascal embodies placidity but not complacency, an untouchable nature that comes from the elimination of stakes from his life. His internal thermostat never moves, because why should it? In contrast, John is weighed down by his stakes. Evans is allowed to retain his movie star looks because his character is an actor, but there’s a level of unhappiness on him that’s potent enough to dull his Captain America charm. John is exhausted and wounded and self-hating, and it’s impressive when a guy who looks like Evans can be credibly pathetic. In such a role, there’s the unavoidable question of how John can compete with Harry, and the film’s success rests on how believable that competition is. Between Song and Evans, for this viewer, they succeed.
Materialists is no unicorn itself, as it’s hampered by an assault subplot involving Lucy’s clients. The fake, ugly world of Lucy’s career doesn’t need to interfere with the more meaningful world of Lucy’s personal life. Instead, Lucy gets way too involved with the assault’s aftermath, skulking around in a trench coat to the point that Song had to know that her film was taking a turn towards the ridiculous. Nothing is learned in this subplot that isn’t unearthed within the love triangle, and the omission of the whole thing would lead to a better film. Nevertheless, Materialists is another strong entry from Song, and features some of the best work of its cast. If a part of cinema is taking the viewer to places they’ll never experience, the Manhattan dating scene gets checked off the list of abysmal hellholes alongside other dreadful places like WWII’s Eastern Front or a Thatcherite mining town. B+
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