Fans of Nora Ephron be warned: Materialists has been grossly mismarketed. Fresh off the success of her Oscar-nominated Past Lives, it seemed puzzling that Celine Song would pivot to this mode of metropolitan dramedy over a decade past its expiry date. The premise is plucked straight from the late ’90s or early aughts: professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is torn between the suave billionaire Harry (Pedro Pascal) and her shaggy ex John (Chris Evans), a catering server who never gave up on his acting gigs. But the film that plays out is unmistakably of and for our current moment, when genres are things to be elevated and narratives are reducible to the think-pieces they might inspire. Anyone familiar with the playwright-turned-director’s work won’t be surprised that Materialists aims high, but in doing so it fails to meet both the romantic and comedic criteria of the genre it’s trying to deconstruct.
Song’s attempts to rise above her own material are apparent from the start; as if to announce that this isn’t your mom’s rom-com, Materialists starts with a wordless depiction of humanity’s first betrothal in prehistoric times. A caveman surprises his sweetheart with a makeshift bouquet and a bag of hand-carved offerings, sealing the deal by twisting one of the flowers into a ring. Though the scene is played straight, it recalls an especially ruthless sight-gag from Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I. Where Song’s film sincerely suggests an inextricable link between partnership and ownership, Brooks’ rollicking sketch comedy gets at the same idea with a literal bump on the noggin — the first Homo sapiens marriage (soon followed by the first homosexual marriage, natch) is staged as a man knocking a woman unconscious and dragging her out of frame.
Materialists cuts to the present day and proceeds to repeatedly strike the audience over the head with its central thesis on romance and value. It carries on in a languid, cynical register as Song’s screenplay twists itself into knots, striving transparently for artful irony and highbrow meaning. Materialists’ first hour indulges half-heartedly in material fantasies as Lucy begins to date Harry and John watches from the fringes with puppy-dog eyes. Evans and Pascal play characters who are designed painstakingly as foils, but Song directs all three of her stars to speak uncannily like each other, from their drawn-out, low-energy cadences to their unrelentingly self-aware turns of phrase. This approach renders the film’s courtships strangely one-sided, as though its screenplay were the main character.
Lucy’s upward mobility places her in proximity to the trimmings and trappings of wealth that she herself does not yet possess; her clients are as entitled and deluded as anyone in the modern dating pool, but their high salaries inflate these qualities to parodic heights (served up eagerly by the film as a banquet of low-hanging fruit). Harry’s wealth and pull, on the other hand, are so extreme that he’s able to cut through all the red tape and engage with Lucy on a more intimate level. She recognizes him as a “unicorn” — their industry term for an “impossible fantasy” — and allows herself to be wooed and pampered with candid caution.
Circumspection is Lucy’s primary reflex because her career, her upbringing, and her relationship with John trained her to see the world through formulas and equations, numbers and dollar signs (she swore herself to singledom for this very reason). Her job involves ticking other people’s boxes –– income, background, age, temperament, BMI, political leaning, even race –– and the mathematics of her everyday life blind her to a much more immediate cause for caution in the modern dating world. The opening’s seemingly accidental parallel to History of the World Part I was already fitting for a film that so thoroughly hammers its points across, but Brooks’s ugly punchline is mirrored at Materialists’ midpoint, when –– without warning or reason –– Lucy discovers that one of her clients was assaulted by the man she set her up with.
It’s a choice that very deliberately, and very cheaply, turns the movie on its head. Lucy’s romantic dilemma is thrown askew (but not fully derailed) by her feelings of ethical responsibility, and the realization of her position in a corporate chain that views these outcomes as “known risks.” Her subsequent attempts to connect with the victim are self-serving in ways that the film never meaningfully resolves, instead allowing its protagonist a convenient moral out that, even more conveniently, lights her path to personal and romantic enlightenment.
Lucy’s rom-commy dilemma runs parallel to a genuinely upsetting suggestion of the dangers we suppress in day-to-day efforts to live out our fantasies. Materialists suppresses these darker undercurrents in the same way, returning to the fantasy unabashedly in its final stretch. It’s one thing to needlessly amplify the rom-com’s pre-existing subtexts of gender and class; it’s quite another to foist a harrowingly prevalent issue onto the genre as a shortcut to thematic import. Materialists renders its pivotal act of violence virtually incidental, reducing it to window-dressing for one woman’s generically dictated choice of love over skepticism.
DIRECTOR: Celine Song; CAST: Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans, Marin Ireland; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: June 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
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