Materialists
A24
Very few mainstream films can live on the brink of reality and romance while attracting swaths of audience members and talent for days. Celine Song opens up her first picture since Past Lives with a prehistoric flashback showing what the audience can only conclude as being the first “marriage.” What follows is one of the most stirring, heart-wrenching, funny, beautiful portrayals of what is so wrong, and so right, within the modern world of dating.
Dakota Johnson (Lucy) plays a matchmaker, not one like Hitch, but one placed within the realities of each audience member, one placed within the New York City that so many people are actually familiar with. Chris Evans (John) plays a down-on-his-luck actor jumping from job to job in the hopes of saving up enough cash to make it through rehearsal season, and he's also quite possibly the only man that Lucy has ever loved. In comes Harry, played astutely by the one Pedro Pascal, a millionaire man working in finance who knows all the right moves, and all the right words, to make a woman fall head over heels. Now, these are very basic archetypes for a film to coast off of, but they also ultimately feel about as real as you can get. There's plenty more to break down in each of these characters, but this is the important stuff that keeps the film rolling.
Lucy is one of the best matchmakers in her line of work. She understands the math of dating and understands what it means to be in the modern dating scene. This leads to some genuinely funny moments with her clients, with most of the humor stemming from how disgustingly real some of these people feel, but this also gives the audience one of the most distressing scenes in the film. Materialists takes on some darker subject matter that, while worthwhile to explore and handled with surprising nuance, can be very difficult to digest.
The main throughline of the film is a bit of a love triangle, one that, unsurprisingly, is between Lucy, John, and Harry. Lucy and John have a history, but Harry checks all the boxes for what a woman like Lucy could want. The film explores the topic of what love truly is from the fascinating standpoint of, “Do we choose who we love? Or is it an uncontrollable within ourselves?” Celine Song takes a moment to ask these questions, and more, to the audience while allowing her fully rounded characters to play out the answer on screen. These people she's written about are as real as your next-door neighbor, and Song wants the audience to know that.
Dakota Johnson is surprisingly well cast and does a lot with Song’s heavy material that weaves through standard genre conventions like a river. Chris Evans is, of course, charming as ever, and is putting on his best performance since Knives Out, showing an everyman vulnerability that he is truly good at. And, lastly, Pedro Pascal is putting on possibly the most layered performance in the film. A man with everything that truly cannot feel anything. Celine Song knows that she has a cast bringing their A game, and shoots the film as so. Song allows the camera to sit with our characters and breathe in every line of dialogue that they say; she lets them converse about their lives, their jobs, and the things that make them tick. It truly is a stunning-looking film for being so simple. It's shot on 35mm film and looks as though the streets of New York are only a few steps away.
Materialists truly is a generational film. It's one that audiences will revisit in the years to come and marvel at how quietly it nails the dating scene for many of those born in the era leading to cell phones and Tinder. Song wants the audience to not take love for granted and understand that it's okay to fight, that it's okay to feel different, and, most of all, that it's okay to work for something even when it feels impossible.
Celine Song just wants to say that love can be really difficult, and that's okay.