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Everyone’s talking about Coke and beer. Writer-director Celine Song and her new film Materialists—her second, following the Oscar-nominated debut Past Lives—are the main characters on Film Twitter this week, where they’re either being staunchly defended or mercilessly picked apart.
I saw the film about two months ago and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s a romantic drama that has the outward appearance of an attempt to restore the feeling of classic aughts Kate Hudson or ‘90s Julia Roberts rom-coms, but it’s really more of a deconstruction of that genre, exploring the inherent vanity behind those types of movies and those types of characters. (Specifically, how they’re always just casually super-rich.) This isn’t the “we are so back” vibes of Glen and Sydney’s Anyone But You, but something that’s at least trying to be way thornier.
Whereas Past Lives was too saccharine for some, critics of Materialists seem to find it alien and off-putting. I’m not sure where I land. But—and who knows what this says about me and my current mindstate—the cynical, nearly nihilistic perspective on relationships and dating? That all worked for me. As Lucy, the data-driven Manhattan matchmaker who approaches relationships and pairings like she’s solving an Algebra II equation, Dakota Johnson pulls off an incredibly understated magic trick,with a perfectly calibrated dryness that makes her (anti?)heroine seem lively even though most of what she’s saying and doing makes her sound like a machine, which is, I think, intentional? Pedro Pascal kind of nails it as a Tribeca-bro swag-succubus, the kind of guy whose charm is wrapped up in his wealth—sitting across from dinner at an impossible-to-get reservation wearing great cologne with absolutely nothing interesting to say. And it’s really only the ending that betrays the sad-dog angle Chris Evans chose to take as John, the hapless brokeboi ex.
Again, if you understood all of that and this still doesn’t add up to a film you find particularly compelling, I understand. But for me, there’s one scene that validates the movie as at least being worthwhile. It’s at the tail end: Lucy, disillusioned by the cult of matchmaking and her own life goals after she torpedoes a relationship that’s perfect on paper, convinces John to abscond to upstate New York with her. There’s nothing romantic or sexy about this getaway—John is a sucker and a helpless simp, he knows it, she knows it, the audience knows it. Eventually the pair stumble onto a gorgeous farm wedding at dusk. We see the ceremony but don’t hear any of it; instead Lucy and John watch from afar and narrate the vows off-camera—but with a twist.
In place of sappy words about love and loyalty, Lucy and John tag-team a back-and-forth verse off the top like prime Jada and Styles—one that’s all about ugly truths, compromises and settling. It betrays a worldview so dark and bleak that I almost started cracking up, but in an even more delicious complication, it’s also the closest and most kindred the two exes seem across the entire movie. It’s one of the most warped and decidedly un-romantic scenes I’ve ever seen in a romance film, and therefore it felt kind of hardcore. It’s both the film’s thesis scene, and the best execution of the off-kilter tone that Song was going for.
It also feels like two characters finally reaching common ground on why they didn’t and will never work, which is why—spoiler—it feels like a rug-pull when the last 20 minutes of the film pivots to a climax straight out of the same type of 25-year-old movie the rest of the movie has been been taking apart. Maybe, for that reason alone, Materialists isn’t a slam dunk. Or maybe a rewatch will make the vision seem clearer. I’m eager to see it again either way, because good or bad, I love when something makes me feel weird. It’s kind of an off-putting film, which is why it’s interesting. Most things today don’t work for the most boring, anodyne reasons. The messes are much more fun to deconstruct.
