MATERIALISTS REVIEW
“Song goes a little too far in trying to write a “unicorn” of a screenplay, and it falls short of that.”
I first heard about Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated film Past Lives when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and it was all the rage. Not having attended in person, I wasn’t able to see it until many months later, but I immediately fell in love with every aspect of it, and it became my favorite movie for most of 2023. After seeing it, I immediately was interested in what Ms. Song might do as her follow-up, and two years later, here we are with Materialists, a movie that notably features another romantic love triangle, but this one featuring bigger-name stars.
Case in point, Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a New York City matchmaker who is at the top of her game finding the perfect mates for her clients, who we meet as she’s helping a particularly tough prospect named Sophie (Zoe Winters). At the wedding for one of her success stories, Lucy encounters the rich and handsome Harry, played by Pedro Pascal. Before anything can happen between them, her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) pops up, as he’s working as a catering server at this wedding. Lucy sees Harry as a perfect “unicorn” for her female clients, and possibly a challenge for her to find him a mate, but he’s interested in dating Lucy, and they give it a go, frustrating John, a struggling actor whose money problems led to his breakup with Lucy years earlier.
This general plot and the film’s trailer makes it seem like the typical Hollywood rom-com involving a love triangle between two men and a woman, the kind of thing that might star Meg Ryan thirty years ago. Fortunately, under Song, it’s not that so much, as it just uses what might seem like a conventional Hollywood trope to explore other aspects of relationships. Unfortunately, it’s also a movie that I had a tough time relating to, because I just don’t date, maybe for some of the same reasons Lucy’s clients have such a tough time finding the perfect mate that they have to turn to a matchmaker. Watching this movie immediately drew me back in time to Frances Ha, the first collaboration between Greta Gerwig and future husband Noah Baumbach, and the running joke that her character is “undatable.” Materialists made me feel even worse, since it’s constantly reminding us that women only want tall, rich men, and anyone else can just suck it and spend their lives alone. Sorry!
At one point, Lucy is talking with potential male clients, and they seem like the absolute worst, in terms of only wanting the youngest and fittest of women. I thought, “Okay, Celine Song is targetting this movie solely to win over the women,” but later in the movie, we get a similar montage with equally shallow women. That doesn’t mean that Materialists is any less of a “chick flick” (a term I hate, mind you), but it doesn’t seem to offer as much for any male dragged to see this movie on a date.
Another problem is that I already feel like Johnson and Pascal have worn out their welcomes, Johnson by starring in so many bad movies over the past few years, and Pascal for being in just about every other project, big or small. They both have grown tiring in my mind. That just leaves Chris Evans, who gives a great performance as a very different character, one with far more flaws and less cocksure than we normally get from him. That’s a bit of a shame, since his character is very much a supporting player for 80% of the movie, vanishing for long periods as the film focuses more on Lucy and Harry. In my opinion, Evans is the best part of this movie, but obviously, it makes sense that the focus of the story is primarily on Lucy and her journey.
Possibly the most interesting turn the movie takes is when something goes wrong with one of Sophie’s dates, putting Lucy’s job in jeopardy. That’s when the movie veers away from traditional rom-com beats and gives the film actual stakes beyond just finding love, and that’s where it really starts to click. Ultimately, I also enjoyed Johnson in this role, as it’s on par with what she delivered for Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth a few years back
Besides Materialists being a second movie from Ms. Song involving a love triangle, it also adds to her run of movies, where the last act leads to two people standing in front of a New York City stoop having a serious moment. We’ll have to wait to see if her third movie can make that a thematic trilogy. Unlike Past Lives, this one ends up in a far more predictable and expected place, which might be better for it achieving mainstream appeal, but I certainly didn’t like it nearly as much as Past Lives.
Materialists mainly works as well as it does, because Song is undeniably a fantastic writer, who writes great dialogue on par with a Diablo Cody or a Quentin Tarantino. Even so, in some places, the characters and their dialogue ring false, only because Song seems to be trying too hard to write a “unicorn” of a screenplay, and it falls quite short of that. Many men might be put off by some of the (mostly true) connotations about what they want in a woman, but Materialists doesn’t seem like the type of date movie that might have thrived on Valentine’s Day. Instead, it’s a movie being released in the midst of summer for no particular reason.
Rating: 7/10
Materialists opens nationwide on Friday, June 13.