Materialists
by Hope Madden
Just two years ago, filmmaker Celine Song produced a breathtakingly original romance movies in Past Lives. With that film, she delivered a love triangle of sorts where no character felt cliched, no choice felt obvious, and every moment felt achingly true.
Now she sets her sights on something decidedly more mainstream, but that only makes her instinct for inverting cinematic cliché in search of authenticity that much more impressive.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a skilled matchmaker at a high-end Manhattan boutique. When she attends the wedding of clients she introduced, she runs into her ex, John (Chris Evans). He’s handsome, thoughtful, clearly into her, and he’s catering. Actually, he’s a waiter working for the caterer.
Lucy also meets the groom’s brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal). In the parlance of Lucy’s profession, Harry is a unicorn: handsome, wealthy, smart, and single.
Immediately, we know this movie. Lucy’s job is to broker relationships. Check boxes. Create partnerships. And the film is going to teach her that a good match can’t hold a candle to the unruly nature of love.
It has been done to death. But the path Song takes to get there, and the insights and realities she explores along the route, never cease to fascinate.
Characters use the words value and risk a lot, terms that have a specific meaning in business but actually mean something quite different in the human setting. It’s interesting, in a society where women have agency and financial means, how different the vocabulary of love can be. Listening to women turn men into commodities, ordering as if from a buffet or build-a-bear, is simultaneously funny and horrifying.
Of course, Lucy has men for clients, too, and Song is quick to remind us of the entrenched language of objectification and conquest. And the different definitions of risk.
She also never asks us to root against anyone. Harry’s a gem. John’s a good dude. The one person whose flaws are explored is Lucy, and Johnson’s reflective, quiet delivery is characteristically on point, allowing those flaws to draw us closer to the character.
Materialists isn’t perfect, and to a degree, Song submits too much to formula. But the way she works within those confines is often magical.