Celine Song gifts us another unusual love triangle with A24‘s Materialists (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), the follow-up to her highly celebrated 2023 Oscar best picture nominee Past Lives. Not that the playwright-turned-filmmaker explores more of the same territory – Materialists swerves in and out of some traditional romantic comedy tropes, indulging them one moment and side-eyeing them the next. She casts Dakota Johnson as a career matchmaker who ends up contemplating her own love life for a change, when she’s torn between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, which seems like a nuclear conundrum ranking up there with Sophie’s Choice. Well, in the abstract, at least.
The Gist: We open with… primitive humans? In a cave? Is this one of those broad-concept Tree of Life dinosaur moments? Yeah, kind of. It’s the First Marriage Ever, and nobody had to pay a third party large sums of money to arrange the first date like Lucy (Johnson) does in modern-day New York City. She’s reduced people down to a series of primary traits: age, weight, height, income, hairlines, education, etc. Her clients express their frustration with dating people who are “40 and fat” or “47 and make $150,000/year.” Lucy says things like “six inches (of height, thank you – ed.) can double a man’s value,” and another in her sphere says, “What’s the saying – ‘you’re not ugly, you just don’t have money’?” These are horrible people. All of them. Lucy included.
But Lucy’s a true pro. She strolls into the office and directly into a party celebrating the ninth marriage spawned from her matchmaking. Perhaps this is because she doesn’t bother to tend her own garden – she labels herself a voluntary celibate, most likely because she won’t marry anyone who isn’t dirty rotten filthy stinking rich, and those people don’t just walk up to you at a wedding reception and introduce themselves, unless you’re in this movie. Enter Harry (Pascal), the best man in his brother’s wedding, one of Lucy’s products (which, notably, she saved by telling the cold-footed bride, “Marriage is a business deal”). He says hi to Lucy and she initially wants him as a client, but ends up enjoying posh meals at posh restaurants on his dime – he’s in finance, of course – and realizes she’s commingling with what people in her profession call a “unicorn.” She finds herself mashing face with Harry in his foyer, and the way she surreptitiously gawks at his sprawling penthouse pad tells us she’d rather f— the apartment.
But. At that very same wedding, one of the waitstaff is John (Evans). Her ex. They were together for five years and they broke up because they were broke. These days he works this catering job between gigs acting in plays in tiny theaters that are so far off Broadway they might as well be in Albany – then he drives his loud clunker home to an apartment he shares with homunculus roommates who leave used condoms on the floor where they can be stepped on. Here’s the thing: What she had with John was that incalculable mysterious thing called love. But if Lucy follows her own matchmaker formula, which involves “ticking all the boxes,” then Harry is her perfect match. Now, we know how we feel about “ticking all the boxes,” but does she believe her own bullshit?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Is it possible to plumb the romantic travails of New York singles without referencing Woody Allen or Noah Baumbach? Or maybe Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan? And don’t forget that literary-minded matchmaking sagas owe a lot to Jane Austen and the many film adaptations of her work.
Performance Worth Watching: Zoe Winters has a supporting role that inspires more emotional engagement than the blandness offered by the three stars: Johnson’s detachment, Pascal’s unusually nice-but-rigid rich guy and Evans’ corny, exasperated hand-to-mouther.
Memorable Dialogue: Lucy puts forth evidence that she’s her clients’ real therapist: “Do you think that any one of them say to their therapist, ‘No Blacks, no fatties’?”
Sex and Skin: Nothing notable.
Our Take: Song’s big ambitious swing is undermined by an inconvenient truth: She gives us a classic head-vs.-heart conflict, but the feeling of being at arm’s-length from the emotional elements of the story is a classic problem. And this cast – I’ll be damned if it isn’t a robust trio of highly talented, highly attractive people who just don’t quite ignite anything in each other or in us bystanders. It’s hard to tell if it’s a casting problem, a writing problem or a directing problem. So we’re left wrestling with the notion that Song may identify with her protagonist all too well, having calculated success on paper – big stars, robust ideas, a smart visual approach – without inspiring much love.
One can explain away some of it via the mere characterization of Lucy, who’s defined by her emotional detachment. Song’s also aiming for something far more subtle than the stuff of mainstream romantic dramas or comedies, steadfastly refusing to create morally simplistic characters easily divvied up as heroes or villains. Materialists and Past Lives show she’s clearly fascinated by human attraction, commitment and romantic interplay, and how relationships so frequently fail to fit inside broad societal boundaries of class and sexuality. Far From Heaven and Romeo and Juliet come to mind, as do the machinations of movies by James L. Brooks or Nancy Meyers. The film’s influences may run deeper than its own themes.
The primary juice of Materialists is obviously wealth and how it’s a factor in what divides us, or brings us together. Lucy has convinced herself that money is what she needs most in a lover, or at least thinks she’s convinced herself. The idea is sidetracked by a miscalculated third-act occurrence that curiously renders another character’s all-too-real tragedy as little more than a ticked box in Lucy’s character development – a sign that Song’s screenplay could use a little more focus, and a little less Stuff Happening.
Our Call: You have to admire Song’s effort to subvert the norms of a shopworn genre, but Materialists is ultimately a disappointment. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.