[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for Celine Song‘s “Materialists,” which is now in theaters.]
“Materialists” has all the goods: An Oscar-nominated auteur, a rom-com heartthrob, a “Fifty Shades of Grey” alum who happens to be Hollywood royalty, a viral babygirl of the internet who led a video game adaptation, and not one, but two MCU superheroes (well, three, if you don’t count the Fox split).
This, as Dakota Johnson‘s matchmaker Lucy would say, checks all the boxes of being a high concept hit. And yet, writer/director Celine Song subverts it all — and that’s the point.
Song’s sophomore feature “Materialists” isn’t a takedown of the rom-com genre (although IndieWire’s Kate Erbland makes a great case that it is). Rather, it’s a hollowing out of the notion that all of the attributes and all of the statistics behind selling yourself on the dating market and selling a film to theatergoers, will lead to happiness, love, or audiences spending more at the box office.
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Lucy (who will assuredly go down as one of Johnson’s most iconic characters) tells us this herself onscreen: Being a matchmaker to the elite is like being something as practical as a mortician or as pragmatic as being an insurance claims adjuster. Being a filmmaker within modern Hollywood, especially at big studios where “art is made by committee,” as Johnson herself has often said, is no different.
Non-independent films are made within an algorithm calculated to appeal to wide audiences; Lucy declares that if there is no wide appeal for a person, then they have to work in a “niche market.” The same can be said for movies today. Song, especially after her beloved feature directorial debut “Past Lives” thrust her into the festival circuit and awards machine, knows this. And Song is subverting this hard truth by way of wrapping the bow of the “shiny package” of the rom-com genre tight around audience throats.
The genre-bent marketing, thanks to A24’s always-brilliant campaigns, wants people to think this film is akin to the latest Aline Brosh McKenna feature. A “leaked” list of cinematic references for the feature, which includes “Age of Innocence,” “Atonement,” “Phantom Thread,” “Emma.,” “Pride & Prejudice,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Terms of Endearment,” reads like a Letterboxd top however many… and that’s on purpose.
“Materialists” is not any of those films — not for lack of technique or loftiness or above and below the line talent, but rather for its tone. “Materialists” serves allusions to “Devil Wears Prada” (that opening montage), “You’ve Got Mail” (that needle drop), and yes, Jane Austen (which rom-com doesn’t, to some degree?), but it’s more Leslye Headland’s “Bachelorette” than Robert Altman’s “The Player” (also on that list).
“Materialists” isn’t about love. It’s about profit. It’s about greed. It’s about Lucy’s — and in part, our own — inner monologue that nothing really matters in this facade of society — and Hollywood. “Materialists” takes a razor blade to the arm of cinema — and it’s invigorating.
Just as “Past Lives” isn’t a romance, “Materialists” is a comedy. And a very dark one at that. While Lucy is too busy telling both her “unicorn” perfect bachelor Harry (Pedro Pascal) and her struggling-actor ex John (Chris Evans) that neither of them actually really “want” her (the comedy is that, they do!), one of her clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters), has her life devastated by “romance” gone horribly wrong.
For Lucy, love is a game of numbers. For Sophie, it’s hell. The contrast, and tonal shift in the moment in which the reveal of what has happened to Zoe is played, will probably shock audiences — not because it’s unrealistic, but because it’s too real. Reality doesn’t belong in rom-coms; fairytales do. Good thing “Materialists” isn’t a rom-com.
There is nothing funny about Sophie’s assault and subsequent, rightful legal action against Lucy’s matchmaking company. There is humor, however, in Lucy being surrounded by identical cheering women who are also in her sorority of peddling soulmates to the soulless as she is told the news. As Lucy’s boss (Marin Ireland) reminds her, dating is a risk. Yet the only risk Lucy can fathom before this moment is the financial kind.
When Sophie (an absolutely brilliant Winters) later spits that Lucy is a “pimp,” we can’t disagree. Lucy is. We all are. We are all complicit in the profiting off of pain and pleasure, especially in the Hollywood machine. It’s a sad truth we already know and try to avoid confronting; Song is just singing it a little louder for us all to hear. “With this movie, I’m trying to do something different,” Song told IndieWire. “It’s fun to play the game and objectify ourselves and each other. It’s catty. But the end of that is going to be dehumanization.”
Is it dehumanizing or hilarious when Harry (Pascal) bends six inches lower to show his true height before his leg augmentation surgery? Is it cringe or funny when Lucy is told “no Black, no fatties” in all seriousness from a client as they name their demands for a mate? Are we supposed to be laughing when Lucy and John break up in front of the Times Square Applebees because he’s too “poor”?
Song toys with broken hearts being as interchangeable as being literally financially broke. The ongoing discussion of dowries is part of Lucy’s skewed perspective, and “Materialists” is told by her, through her. Instead of dating dealing solely in the currency of sex, it’s about shelter, food, and yes, material goods.
Opening the film on cavepeople (another chuckle or WTF moment, depending on who you ask) reinforces that: Humans have always been shallow. Lucy and her clients are no different. It’s easy to imagine “Materialists” set in a future where there are leaderboards with stock market asset evaluations for suitors (again, another real marketing technique by the studio). Or even today, when box office returns and lengths of standing ovations are still breathlessly reported every weekend.
“People are people are people are people,” Lucy says to her boss after complaining that all of her clients are acting like children. They are because she is, because we all are. Song has captured this circular cynicism with her subversive, pun-filled film. The only meaningful transaction here? Buying a ticket to go see it.
An A24 release, “Materialists” is now in theaters.
