Not the romcom it’s perhaps made out to be?
Finances may not be ‘romantic’, but they inevitably facilitate a romantic relationship – and a film which addresses that matter-of-factly, within a romantic genre, has potential to be novel… or fall flat.
With Materialists, it feels like writer-director Celine Song is trying to fashion an unfamiliar kind of movie out of different parts, both familiar and novel, which we have and haven’t seen before in romantic films. Perhaps it’s the casting, or the marketing, or even elements of the film’s language itself, but Materialists certainly traffics in romantic comedy vibes when it isn’t a comedy, and could arguably not even be called romantic. As a result, I’m not convinced Materialists gets where it’s trying to go, but I’m also not sure whether that’s because of the movie falling short of its own goals, or because it is successful in being unrecognizable in a landscape of romantic movies.
Song’s previous film and feature directorial debut, the extraordinary Past Lives (2023), also presents a love triangle of sorts, and is similarly subversive in its honesty; each moment, each beat, contributes to it being quietly disarming and then quietly devastating.
Materialists feels slightly less focused, like perhaps one or two elements aren’t quite calibrated, and so the whole piece doesn’t quite work as a result.
It could be that the choice with which professional match-maker Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is presented isn’t complicated, only because Lucy herself isn’t complicated; or it could be that in the end, her choice between rich Harry (Pedro Pascal) and poor John (Chris Evans) doesn’t seem to be the product of anything she’s gone through in the film, but rather an inevitability which was only a matter of time. That’s fine – but that does not necessarily compelling romance, dramatic or otherwise, make. It could also be that the casting is too distracting: Dakota Johnson’s Lucy seems too detached to be so indecisive, or so affected by that, as her character is written to be; and neither Chris Evans nor Pedro Pascal is surprising in his charm or vulnerability, yet the story beats hinge upon the layers revealed of each of them.
Like many others it seems, I anticipated a romcom from the writer-director of Past Lives – an unexpected direction for a follow-up, and an intriguing proposition. Materialists isn’t that, but it isn’t more than that either.
Further Viewing
Writer-director Celine Song addresses what she characterises as cruel classism underpinning the reading of Materialists as “broke man propaganda” (via refinery29):
If you haven’t already seen it, what are you even doing: