Film of the Week #16: Materialists

Celine Song's follow up to Past Lives is a step forward in directorial confidence, but suffers from issues with casting, dramatic urgency.

Guess their tax brackets. Come on, be realistic.

Sometimes a film just cannot overcome a few fatal flaws. Despite a bevy of obvious and subtle virtues, and a clear advance in confidence and technique by its director Celine Song, her latest film, Materialists, just cannot clear the obstacle of believability. Unfortunately, the movie seemed doomed to fail this criterion from the very first moment that the filmmakers decided to cast Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans, of all actors, in the roles of struggling New York artists (or former artist, in the case of Johnson’s character, Lucy). Despite the careful, plausible rendering of Lucy’s professional life within the highly niche field of matchmaking and a delicate touch in weaving together the various coincidences and encounters that create the central love triangle narrative, I personally found it nigh impossible to focus on anything other than how Chris Evans just does not look like he’s broke. In fact, I found it hard to believe that he had ever been or could ever be broke. This is even after (in the name of suspension of disbelief) giving the pass to Dakota Johnson playing a sub-6-figure salary mid-level employee who had a failed stint in the acting world herself, if only because I found her performance rather interesting in a quirky, abstract way.

Outside of this core issue, the movie itself is solid and well-made, shot beautifully by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner and edited together with grace by Keith Fraase. There is a craftsmanship and attention to detail that is undeniable here, from the en plein air New Yorkiness of the exteriors to the soft, sculpted lighting of the luxe interiors, to the beat-perfect music cues and the smooth, unobtrusive cuts to flashbacks. The script is thoughtfully put together, placing a lot of emphasis on long, substantial dialogue scenes between Lucy and the characters around her, where the director’s philosophical, essayistic frame of mind is easily perceived. In fact, Song might be a little too reliant on the written word to carry her subject matter to the audience, frequently putting the film’s dominant themes, theses, and objections into the mouths of her characters, while the action of the movie itself lags behind and doesn’t shape our experience or understanding as much as it might.

It might be that the plotting is just a touch too slight: Lucy meets rich finance guy Harry (Pedro Pascal) at the wedding of one of her successful clients, which is coincidentally catered by her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), whom she had broken up with years prior for being too poor. (This last descriptor is a bit harsh, and the movie goes to pains to contextualize it, but suffice it to say the means of living are a not insignificant part of the relationship equation that the movie tries to solve.) Harry pursues Lucy steadfastly, and while Lucy pushes back at first, wanting instead to have him as a client, she relents when Harry convinces her that what he wants is a woman like Lucy who will treat the relationship as a business relationship, as a deal to be made. The two proceed to date – they even shake hands on it – while John is left on the backburner, though it’s clear that John’s reappearance in Lucy’s life is not a casual occurrence. A rather nice flashback scene to an anniversary dinner derailed by John not being willing to pay 25 bucks for parking helps demonstrate both the intimacy and authenticity of their past as well as their current incompatibility, given that Lucy half-jokingly says that she will only marry rich or super-rich. To Johnson’s credit, Lucy’s opaque professionalism, displayed in her ASMR-like, monotonic phraseology in her dealings with clients, is played with pitch-perfect archness and artificiality, giving the film a solid foundation in sketching out a world where math reigns supreme in relationship considerations.

But the film starts to wobble forward uncertainly when the film moves inevitably to explore the more human, sentimental aspects of romantic relationships. This transition from math to humanities is at once rigidly schematic and oddly vague and confusing. A subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients being sexually assaulted on a date is used as the mechanism for chipping away at the facade of rationalism in Lucy’s life. Upon learning of the assault, Lucy proves unable to cope with the reality of her meticulous matchmaking having led to such an outcome. She lashes out at her annoying clients and is kindly put on leave by her boss. She calls John, not Harry, to talk it out, which struck me as too writerly a way to show that her relationship with John is the more personal one to her. This may be because Song is generous to her characters to a fault: I didn’t get the sense that Harry would have been unable to discuss this kind of event with her.

The structure of the film thus starts to become a bit disconnected from the content of the film; by the end of the movie, it seems implied that Harry is incapable of love, devoid of sentiment, etc, but on the face of it he seemed like a decent enough chap throughout. And John is put in the structural role of the passionate, the authentic, the humble but true – but as I mentioned in the first paragraph, the fact that he’s Chris Evans just makes it really hard to have that characterization feel grounded in any sense of reality. What’s truly missing here is a sense of what it means for Lucy to be with Harry or to be with John, a sense of what she truly wants. So when the love triangle ultimately resolves into a dichotomy between love and calculation, the story loses all its dimension due to the lack of a clear difference between Lucy’s two choices. You don’t feel the weight or the cost or the feeling that drives her decision because we don’t really understand Lucy’s emotional life in enough detail to imagine the difference in her life with one or the other.

In contrast, Lucy’s involvement with Sophie (Zoë Winters), the client who was sexually assaulted, seems to bring more out of Song, and is the one thread of the film that felt charged with expressiveness and purpose. Lucy’s genuine care for this client juts out against her general detachment even in her scenes with John; Song has to use the energy generated by this subplot just to get the film across the finish line, as an urgent call from Sophie brings Lucy and John back from upstate New York to help Sophie fend off her assaulter. Here, the film seems to be free of the writerly conceptualizations that threaten to bury the film in abstraction. Perhaps the presence of a malevolent off-screen presence allows Song to be more direct, more assertive. Her films remind me a bit of Richard Linklater’s work: intelligent, well-crafted, radiating a sort of kindness to each and every character, using naturalism as a front to disguise the desire to philosophize and even moralize. As with Linklater, this kind of even-keeled, rational temperament can tip films into blandness unless the subject matter can draw out a more engaged perspective. Here’s hoping Song can stick the knife in a little deeper in her next project.