RATING
Director(s): Celine Song
Country: United States
Author: Celine Song
Actor(s): Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans Pedro Pascal
Written by Tom Augustine
Bizarrely, as I was watching Materialists, I started thinking about I Give it a Year, a really quite bad anti-rom-com that has justifiably faded into the collective cultural ether. Starring Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall, the film was part of a strange spate of feel-bad comedies that, as time passes, come to reflect the mid-Obama years with increasing savagery (think Bachelorette and That’s My Boy on the good side, Horrible Bosses, Bad Teacher and *shudder* the Hangover trilogy on the bad). In that film, a pair of hideously mismatched young lovers quickly tie the knot, only to increasingly fall to pieces over the course of a year. The reason I started thinking about I Give It A Year was because it was one of the earliest examples I can think of where I watched a film that aimed to not only subvert romcom cliches, but expose their falsity, only to strand their audience in a uniquely miserable watching experience. Celine Song’s new film, the follow-up to the excessively over-praised Past Lives, is better than that film and nowhere near as bad as I Give It A Year. But it doesn’t really work, never fully convinces us of the conceit at play, and I can’t help but think it’s for the same reason. Materialists, like I Give It A Year, works so hard to hammer a cynical worldview into the frothy architecture of the ‘New York romance’, only to arrive at the same destination as the films it seemingly longs to upturn. This has worked in the past (see: When Harry Met Sally), but the parts never add up to a whole here — and most fatally, Song herself seems unconvinced by anything the film puts forth.
Would Materialists work better if it leaned into the frothiness, the fun that even more serious-minded romance films like Broadcast News or The Apartment have built into their DNA? The film’s bizarre framing device — telling us early on that this film is not quite the film the overly-optimistic marketing might have suggested — implies that a lighter touch than Song’s could have done wonders. In it, a caveman picks a bouquet of flowers, bringing them back to a cavewoman, where he fashions a daisy into a ring, placing it on the cavewoman’s finger. Smash cut to New York City, modern day. Yes, this is really how the film Materialists begins. At first, I thought this might be an intriguing, unexplained prologue in the vein of A Serious Man. Sadly, that’s not the case, but it’s a quite hilariously goofy opening play for a film that, by-and-large, trips over itself in its artful seriousness. As seen in Past Lives, Song’s go-to filmmaking mode is evidently one of a kind of suffocating refinement that plays fatally precious, draining much of the tension and emotion from proceedings. Its occasional stabs at comedy are increasingly bizarre, as they mash up against the extremely serious subplots the film introduces without ever seeming to consider their implications. Materialists, almost fatally, seems totally unsure of what it is, leaving a lot of the heavy lifting on the shoulders of the three leads who acquit themselves well, despite the filmic execution sealing any genuine chemistry in a hermetic vault far away from audience eyes. The fact that Materialists, after all this, becomes a singularly odd experience is the best feather in its cap — an attempt was made, which is worth celebrating, even as it falls flat nearly as often as it succeeds.
Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, the best employee at matchmaking service Adore, an upmarket date arrangement fixer for New York’s elite. Lucy has forsworn relationships for herself — she’s chronically self-aware of her own need for material things, stemming from a childhood of precarity. That changes when she’s approached by Harry (Pedro Pascal), a handsome, refined finance bro almost comical in his ability to tick every box. At the same time, actor John (Chris Evans), an old flame from Lucy’s youth, reappears in her life, and the two tentatively begin to reconnect. A love triangle begins to emerge, just as the walls Lucy has built around herself, and secured herself upon, begin to crumble when a terrible transgression occurs at her workplace. All three performers are intriguing choices — all have been derided for a supposed lack of acting talent despite having turned in strong work in the past. Materialists serves as a strong rebuke to the haters, with each performer getting a chance to prove (or reprove, as needed) their abilities. Johnson is a soulful presence in the lead, her icy unruffled charisma a rarity in the Hollywood starlet system and pleasingly spiky here. The actress works hard to hold us within the bumpiness of the narrative, and largely succeeds. Pascal, in the midst of a major emergence as one of the world’s biggest stars, is by turns mysterious, seductive, tender and vulnerable. I found myself missing his presence when he wasn’t in the action — his is a performance not designed to draw attention to itself, but does anyway. Evans, meanwhile, has the most work to do to earn back admirers who saw something in his work in Sunshine and Snowpiercer, and the early Captain America movies. After years in the post-Marvel wilderness, it’s a pleasure to see shades of a hungry performer emerge, and he sells the vital third act emotional developments of Materialists at a crucial juncture.
Director Celine Song’s follow-up to romantic hit Past Lives is a far more peculiar item than its frothy promotion might suggest. The story of a love triangle playing out within a New York romantic scene pitched as a ‘marketplace’, it is an atonal mishmash that hits only slightly more than it misses.
At the heart of Materialists is an inquiry of where love comes from in an increasingly commodified world which has very much seeped into our treatment of relationships and how we see each other. That’s a welcome, bold set of ideas to contend with: a gentle critique of hyper-capitalism emerges through the way the need for material safety has infected these characters who have been victimised by it in the past. For the rich lonelyhearts who make use of Adore’s service, this is even more pronounced in the extensive lists of nonnegotiable attributes their potential matches must have — height, net worth, property, build. A pivotal moment of the film sees Lucy describing Harry’s various sellable points to his face — the man is what is termed a ‘unicorn’ in the matchmaking world, a hyper-rich, hyper-attractive yet not-insufferable viable male. And yet, their union (by design, it becomes clear), is as much about the way the two boost each other’s personal portfolios as any genuine attraction. What makes Lucy an interesting character is her own awareness of this failing within herself, an inability to desire something outside of a system that continually oppresses her, financially, spiritually, romantically. When she first hooks up with Harry, she finds herself drawn away from his kisses to gape at his cavernous apartment. John, meanwhile, is aggressively penniless — living in a ludicrously disgusting, cramped apartment with boorish roommates (one of the many strangely broad gags rammed into the film’s material), the initial falling out between him and Lucy arose over an argument about a twenty-five dollar parking charge.
The parts are all there for an intriguing, openhearted discussion of the modern dating game — it’s a film jam-packed with ideas, and yet Song’s treatment of the material generates an amply claustrophobic, at times exhausting atmosphere that renders so much of the film’s content inert, inorganic. The characters’ overscripted, theatre-like dialogue overexerts itself, as does Song’s need for robust, painterly compositions that clash badly with the energy the film is begging to let loose. The film’s most jarring element is a subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients (Zoe Winters), an increasingly desperate thirtysomething led down a dark path by Lucy’s matchmaking. It’s a development that, by virtue of being embedded in a romance film, plays second fiddle to Lucy’s personal dramas, despite arguably requiring its own film to contend with. One finds oneself wondering why so much oxygen is being given elsewhere when a narrative twist of such gravitational intensity has been introduced — and the lack of genuine introspection or catharsis on this front by film’s end feels like a major misjudgment. It’s the kind of swing-and-miss that is difficult to watch in real time, so misguided it feels when it emerges. The film’s final third, when it comes closest to signs of real life, brings genuine romantic chemistry to the fore for the first time, a breath of fresh air. It’s enough to leave a warm feeling in the viewer walking out of the cinema — and yet I felt unconvinced by what Song had put forth. Materialists wears neither abject cynicism nor woozy romanticism particularly well. The angular, unwieldy work that emerges is fascinating for that very reason, but probably not in the way the director likely intended.
Materialists is in cinemas now.