Good cinematography can obscure bad writing, and I'm not really sold on what Materialists is selling about us. The film has charm and disarms in funny little interludes, yet it's disinterested in anything besides the aesthetic.
Our coverage of Celine Song's Sophomore feature will be split - this is the American review, written up by our very own Michel Abdulaziz. If you don't want to miss Umnia's thoughts on the film when it comes out in August in the UK, subscribe to our mailing list!
When we're young, we yearn for love with the language of our chick flicks. The meet cute, the spontaneous connection, an anguished declaration; love is a pretty valuable fantasy. Then we grow up and that affection warps, it complicates. Dating apps, gym pictures, BMIs, hairlines; love as a cacophony of qualifiers. For Celine Song’s sophomore feature, Materialists is an apt title in how it decomposes the business of dating; dressed like a perfect match and hiding a stifled satire of impossible expectations, all about love. bell hooks would have a field day.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is an ultra glam matchmaker in the hyper competitive streets of New York City. She can tailor everything to her clientele’s obscenely improbable tastes. Fitness, height, weight limits to bank account digits. On the high of another successful match, she finds herself caught between the man of her dreams (Pedro Pascal) and the ex that got away (Chris Evans). What seems fit for a Hitch typed romantic comedy isn't—like it really isn't, and it's to Song’s commitment to hoisting sugar sweet tropes to catfish the audience. Materialists has very successfully marketed itself as something in the line of those schmaltzy bridal romances which dominated the 2005-2009 romcom season, but if Past Lives was sun-kissed and melancholically alcoholic, Song’s second outing is austere, cold in its approach.
It is kind of Challengers. Just not in the way we expected. The film challenges the idea of who we're “supposed” to be with, and it’s cynical about its relationships until it isn't. Johnson fares best in terms of performance here because her blunt detachment is uniquely suited to the film’s Glossier curated world, but Pascal (an actor I usually like) turns in a nothing burger where Evans (an actor I usually don't) mines passable out of weak material. The Dakota-Pedro-Chris triangle was never in the cards for us. The characters don't so much have chemistry as they do history—I buy the layers of friction and wasted youth, which works. It provides an interesting twist on the formula I credit Song on, though it's not enough to sustain 117 minutes of fluff before she pulls on a too loaded for this movie twist to shift its tone that ruins any trust I had in it.
Good cinematography can obscure bad writing, and I'm not sold on what Materialists is selling about us. The film has charm and disarms in funny little interludes, yet it's disinterested in anything besides the aesthetic. Looks great! Poorly constructed! Remarkably irresponsible in its execution of a particular story choice (especially so for a female filmmaker of Song’s caliber). What does this film say about the economy of modern dating—where money is apex and love secondary? It turns out: nothing you can't get off a cringy Hinge storytime.
“Am I disposable?” say different characters over the course of the film, and I have to say: yes. The film flaunts character traits and struggles so mechanically that monologues read like stage directions, and traumas are unearthed casually to move the story along. Song makes it chic, I'll give her that, in reaching for harsh romantic dramas of yesteryear but she neglects their emotional core and makes it basic, bare. Satire is what she's going for, but in practice it turns out indistinguishable from what TikTok does (and what it wants to lampoon): how the digital flattens romance to a litmus test. In that sense Materialists is like an artificially generated wedding cake: disappointing, and disgusting to think about for too long.
@obscurae