In an early scene of Celine Song’s Materialists, a bride is seen getting cold feet on her wedding day. She’s never much believed in the institution of marriage, she feels swept up in the social obligation of it, and she recognizes a real shallowness in the fact her motivation is bent around the jealousy she senses in her sister over her handsome wealthy husband-to-be. She confesses all this to of all people, her matchmaker Lucy -played by Dakota Johnson. Lucy very calmly and concisely asserts from this last point that what this means is that the bride loves her groom because he makes her feel valuable, like someone to envy. It is transparent emotional manipulation from a woman who herself clearly values this wedding as a favourable mark on her reputation, but Lucy is a very good salesperson -her commodity just happens to be love, or the illusion of it. And it works like a charm.
Lucy is a woman who sees romantic compatibility as a mathematical formula to solve -it’s merely a matter of matching data sets of age preference, wealth preference, attractiveness, and other qualities she deems easily quantifiable. And she has nine marriages to prove the validity of her formula. She works for Adore, a New York City matchmaking firm that caters broadly to an elite clientele of women in their thirties looking to settle down with someone financially well-off and men in their forties looking for women in their twenties. It can be a cynical job, but Lucy has come to believe in her formula, even when her clients have doubts. She has to believe in it because it would explain the break-up of her relationship with her broke but very loving ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor still carrying a torch for her in spite of everything. Yet she still finds a wrench thrown in it when the extremely wealthy and charming Harry (Pedro Pascal) -decidedly incompatible with her by this rubric- starts romancing her.
The movie has been sold on the fairly innocuous nature of this love triangle. The woman who has worked her way into privileged circles having to choose between the poor guy with genuine affections for her and the rich guy who to her surprise has the same. And the poor guy is as incredibly poor as the rich guy is exorbitantly rich. John lives in a shabby apartment with at least three roommates, none of whom have much sense of personal space or cleanliness, while Harry has several residences including a pristine penthouse with a view and ample room to spare. John has to wait tables and take small jobs until the next acting gig comes along, Harry -a high-end investment banker- has never had to worry about having enough money to get by. Even their introductions in relation to Lucy are made to deliberately reflect status: Harry presented as the focal point in the foreground, listening to Lucy’s socializing behind him, while John is caught fleetingly in the background of a totally unrelated conversation between Lucy and Harry (if for not Evans’s signature looks you might not notice him). But while the contrast seems very basic, even mundane, Song takes the class conversation at the heart of the film -and at the heart of Lucy particularly- very seriously.
It’s right there in the title. And Lucy very much seems like a materialist, looking at relationships as investments and her own prospects judged by high market value. But while she may be shallow, she is not vain, and conceals the real complexity in her feelings around romance through meaningless aphorisms and her perfectly modulated sales pitch. She understands and strives to be a part of her rich circles, but applies her own limitations on herself. Because her faith in her formula derives from her inability to assess her own character flaws. Her journey through this movie is of those conceptions breaking down in ways both temperate -as in Harry’s excellent single-take speech over dinner of why he defies her expectations in wanting to be with her- and more dramatically charged.
Song gets across a lot of criticisms of matchmaking as an industry, often in the form of the bewildering expectations of clients divorced from reality and self-awareness (and just divorced literally as several of these one-percenters are). But she also tackles it in quite a severe way, the kind that easily arises when people are brought together under calculated standards rather than human ones. Song constructs it artfully; Sophie (Zoë Winters) being introduced as something of a comic relief impossible client, only for a portion of the movie to hone in on her in the most unfortunate way, tapping into a core fault of this kind of service while exposing Lucy’s humanity and -in spite of everything- genuine concern for the people she means to help. Winters gives a stupendous performance as well.
But Johnson surprises more as she gradually peels back the layers of affect Lucy puts on as both a necessity of the job and a kind of shield that starts to crater with her disillusionment. We are made to understand well how even she can’t wholly tell the difference between them in her growing vulnerability and reckoning with the cracks in her perspective. And it’s these foibles that make her compelling and empathetic in spite of her tendencies -you can see just a bit of what John sees in her. And as for John, Evans is wonderful too -managing to embrace his long-gestated natural movie star romantic charisma. There is no question his humble charms make him the guy Lucy should give a second chance to -though Pascal does in fairness lend real authenticity to his option as well, a social victim of his wealth as much as a beneficiary.
Scenes between Lucy and either of her suitors are the highlights of the movie, and not just because the actors have good chemistry but because they and Song do an apt job relating a mature sense of romance and understanding of love very distinct from the usual kinds of rom-com sentiments. Conversations they engage in feel almost akin to the Before Trilogy (and Before Sunset particularly), where there is frank acknowledgment of the risks in relationships, the nuances of compatibility, and the contractual nature of marriage that feels an extension of one of Song’s primary influences -Pride and Prejudice. And Song very much threads that needle of delineating the social mechanics of marriage while uplifting its thematic concept, which she does clearly believe in. And the approach taken through these characters is inextricably linked to a feeling of romantic urgency -all are at least well into their thirties and feel as though time is running out to find that meaningful romance while relatively young. There is sexual tension through this movie but it is subtle, nobody is driven by sex or pure desire -they are all grown and experienced enough in that department to instead be craving lasting attachment; the comfortable mundane of love not easy to romanticize in a way that doesn’t come off as an antiquated or religious precept of dreary pseudo-chastity. Song does find a way though, articulating love in terms of longevity and a richer, humane understanding of value impossible for Lucy’s algorithm to quantify. And still with plenty of good sentimental romantic expression.
It is evident in Song’s beautiful filmmaking, the way she oscillates between artificial and lush aesthetics in design, lighting, and editing to draw a line between the impersonal and the personal. Past Lives demonstrated her gift for warm romantic atmosphere, and though her visual choices here aren’t quite so bold it is still related wonderfully. Hardly ever does she cut during important conversations, letting them play in long takes at immersive vantage points. She knows how best to use her actors and especially her setting. Song may be a transplant from Canada, but she is in love with New York, shooting it with affectionate colour and composition through both the ritzy and humbler corners eliciting a charm befitting its character.
The plot of Materialists could fly at virtually any time in the past forty or so years, but it is an incredibly modern movie in its approach to the class dynamics and superficiality that Song -who did work for a matchmaking firm- has observed is a driving factor in the pursuit of relationships today. This movie exists to tear those down and even question a lot of long-held precepts around the sociology of relationships, marriage, and compatibility. But it is romantic at its heart and finds something really sincere and beautiful amid the noise, even in spite of it, that feels both old-fashioned and daringly new. And it proves that Past Lives was not a fluke debut. Celine Song is indeed the great new champion of mature and provocative yet warmly sentimental romantic drama. We lost that for a time -I hope she keeps it alive.
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