‘Materialists’ Review: Love is Worth the Investment in Celine Song’s Refreshingly Modern Romance [B+]
Celine Song begins her lovely sophomore feature, Materialists, with a bit of a surprising artistic gamble. We’re surrounded by mountains in nature, and it’s oh so quiet as two cave people fall in love. Their adoration for each other is uncomplicated and beautiful, absent of the bells and whistles of modern dating. Within the first few minutes of the film, Song establishes that people have been falling in love for centuries, and no matter how simple it might be, it can feel grand and revelatory. Visually, the couple perfectly illustrates how people feel when they’re in love: they might just be the only two people in the world. Importantly, this short scene also plays as a striking contrast to the hustle and bustle of New York City that’s been so present in the film’s trailers and promotion. Was it all so simple long ago? In Materialists, Song argues that, at its core, love has always been easy. It’s dating, amidst all of the sophistication of technology and an overwhelming array of potential personalities, that has made the pursuit of love feel totally impossible.
Flash forward to present-day, and the cacophony of yellow cabs and Cat Power’s “Manhattan” fills the silence as Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) puts on her lip liner and silver hoop earrings to head out to a string of meetings with her clients. Fans of the romantic comedy genre, it’s in this moment that you’ll know you’re in good hands. Lucy or “Lucy M,” as her coworkers call her, is a successful matchmaker at the high-end, boutique company, Adore Matchmaking. With its clean branding and feminine aesthetics, Adore calls to mind dozens of successful (and failed) companies looking to capitalize on a subset of high-earning millennial women and their need for self-care (Glossier, Zola, The Wing). It’s a luxury, bespoke experience, and while Song doesn’t reveal the specific cost of Adore’s services, the clientele can clearly afford to spend a significant amount of time and money to find someone with a similar bank account. Adore’s clients are paying top dollar for a potential partner, so naturally, they feel entitled to rattle off their never-ending list of superficial demands (height, fitness, education level) like they’re hunting for their next apartment. Song (who once worked as a matchmaker herself) creates clients who are pretty frank in their desires, sharing personal preferences with Lucy like she’s their therapist who won’t judge them and will write them the exact prescription they need for eternal love and happiness. In the first of a few comical montages, Lucy meets with a handful of prospective suitors, introducing the audience to the film’s specific language and tone. “Thirty-nine is not thirties, it’s forty,” one man (pushing fifty) laments when looking for a younger woman. When Lucy tells a client that one of her dates isn’t interested in a second one, she comments, “He’s balding. How fucking dare he?” In these moments, Song picks apart the current state of dating, recognizing that it’s as if apps and the gamification of searching for a partner have permitted everyone to be more shallow and unrealistic.
Lately, there’s reason to celebrate at Adore: one of Lucy’s clients is getting married, marking her ninth successful engagement since being at the company. It’s here that Song first establishes the script’s irony, commenting on the current state of the wedding industrial complex. There’s a chilly, clinical way that the women at Adore speak about their clients, always referring to them by first name and last initial and openly discussing their demands and how promising they are. For the matchmakers, a wedding on the calendar equates to professional success and indicates that they’ve done the impossible: found a man who checks all of the boxes for one of their finicky clients. As Lucy notes, marriage has always been a business deal after all. Even though Lucy is excellent at her job, with razor-sharp instincts and an eagle eye for chemistry, finding love for herself isn’t as easy. Maybe it could be, but it doesn’t seem like something she’s even interested in putting on the table for herself. She’s an “eternal bachelorette.” Johnson is the perfect match for the role of Lucy, bringing her effortlessly cool aura and bone-dry sense of humor into each scene (“it’s like working at a morgue or an insurance company,” she quips). This is particularly evident when she appears to be holding court at her client Charlotte’s wedding, convincing the bridesmaids that she can help them find love too. Like Johnson’s collaborator, Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, Suspiria), Song understands that her power as an actress lies in her ability to remain relatable yet somewhat unknowable. She’s there to be a guide and magician who just wants to help them find what they’re looking for, and is wisely never illustrated as a romantic threat to the women she works for or alongside.
The wedding changes everything for Lucy, though, as two diametrically opposed men are brought into her web. First, the groom’s brother Harry (Pedro Pascal) sees her from across the room and takes note of her business pitch to the women who haven’t yet found the man of their dreams. He maneuvers his way into sitting next to Lucy at the singles table, telling her that her sales pitch is perfect because she makes it feel like it’s their idea. On paper, Harry is a ten. He’s the hottest guy at the wedding and ridiculously rich, making him what the women at Adore call “a unicorn.” Lucy isn’t interested in dating Harry, though; he’s way too good of a business proposition and could be the dream fit for one of her clients. But just as she requests a Coke and a beer (a cursed drink order that is never explained), John (Chris Evans), a cater waiter at the wedding, magically appears with a glass and a bottle. John and Lucy are excited to see each other and have a palpable chemistry that’s missing from her initial meeting with Harry. Their connection isn’t a conversation about business with a sprinkle of sexual tension, but something far more comfortable. The women at Adore wouldn’t exactly know what to do with John. He’s good-looking (this is Chris Evans, of course), but he’s a 37-year-old struggling actor picking up shifts with a catering company to tide him over until his play. He doesn’t have a driver, but a beat-up car, and pays $850 a month in rent to live in Brooklyn with two roommates. To complicate things further, Song reveals in flashbacks that John and Lucy broke up on their fifth anniversary because he was broke, and their fights about money became constant. This relationship seemed to break Lucy and (for better and for worse) shape her relationship to matchmaking, proving that maybe love is easier when the money and the math work out.
While Song’s knockout directorial debut, Past Lives, also navigated the murky waters of a woman figuring out her relationships with two very different men, it would be reductive to call the dynamic between the film’s three characters a love triangle. In Past Lives and Materialists, Song isn’t interested in the drama found in a love triangle and instead uses the stark differences between the two men in a woman’s life to communicate a more profound self-discovery. The beauty in Past Lives, though, lied in the story’s intricate construction and the deep thematic resonance explored in the script’s brilliant subtleties. By the time our protagonist Nora reconnected with Hae Sung in the present, Song had built up decades worth of story between them, perfectly establishing their opposing pathways to lead to the film’s shattering conclusion. In Materialists, the themes are a bit heavy-handed, and the characters are far more archetypal, without the level of detail needed to be consistently invested in their relationship progression. This is particularly evident as Harry begins to court Lucy. At first, Lucy treats him like a client, using her directness and dating acumen to get to know him until their relationship becomes more serious. While Pascal is incredibly convincing as Harry, his scenes with Johnson can sometimes feel stiff, as their conversations are laden with corporate jargon and business metaphors (“you’re a luxury good”). What was so striking about Past Lives was how achingly real the characters felt, and here, the actors say things that sound like they would never come from the mouth of a real person, solely in service of the script’s themes. Sometimes, watching two beautiful actors opposite each other is enough, but when the script purports to tackle something greater, the lack of depth in the drawing of a character feels more evident.
Even though the conversations between the characters can feel unrealistic, that sense of fantasy is also a staple of some of the greatest romantic dramas and comedies that Song references (Working Girl, featuring Johnson’s mother Melanie Griffith, comes to mind). In Materialists, the lights in New York City twinkle a bit brighter, the satin sheets look a little shinier, and the business casual is always chic and never stuffy. Alongside cinematographer Shabier Kircher’s crisp images of the skyline and production designer Anthony Gasparro’s gorgeous mid-century modern, luxury interiors, Song crafts a dreamy version of New York City evocative of Manhattan or Annie Hall. That yearning to find what you’re looking for in New York is also beautifully illustrated in Chris Evans’ performance as John. In John’s scenes with Lucy, Evans feels perfectly aligned with Song, filling in the character’s history with a single look or turn of phrase. Even though the character’s trajectory can feel predictable, Evans’ performance is full of surprises. It’s in this relationship and a complex subplot with Lucy’s client Sophie L. (a fabulous Zoë Winters) that Song flexes her writing muscles and incorporates a darker bit of drama into the narrative, challenging our heroine’s preconceived ideas of dating. She has performed a sort of cynical confidence throughout her career and the narrative, but it’s all so much messier than it seems.
Last year, TimeOut published a list of the worst U.S. cities for dating, and New York City earned its place in the number one spot. Despite the city’s massive population and the plethora of choices, finding your person in New York proved incredibly difficult. So why then are so many of the greatest romance films set in New York City? After writing and directing two romances in New York, Song seems to have figured it out. When you somehow find love against that romantic city backdrop, despite the complications and protestations, it will feel as simple as it did centuries ago. While it may lack the thematic complexity of Song’s first film, Materialists is a sparkling cocktail of a movie that’s sure to zap the hearts of audiences this summer.
Grade: B+
A24 will release Materialists in theaters on June 13.
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