Check me in with the crowd that was blown over by Celine Song’s first full-length feature, Past Lives (2023)—a deceptively simple movie with a universal message about missed opportunities. It is a rare, rare thing for me to break into an ugly cry, but when Nora’s (a remarkable Greta Lee) husband opened the gate to their walk-up for her and she burst into tears, I followed suit.
Two years later, Song has returned with her follow-up, Materialists, a movie marketed as a romantic comedy, but that’s a high-level bait and switch. Sure, there are moments of humor—such as when Pedro Pascal’s Harry switches table cards at a wedding dinner so he can sit next to Lucy (Dakota Johnson), and pitches the original card over his shoulder with wanton disregard. I laughed aloud in the moment, and I might have done the same a couple more times during the movie’s 116-minute run time, but, if anything, Materialists is a romantic drama with a side order of pragmatism.
Harry is a very wealthy NYC man from the world of finance, and Lucy is a matchmaker at a dating service making under six figures. During the wedding dinner, a member of the waitstaff named John (Chris Evans) recognizes her and they share a long embrace that is well beyond Harry’s comfort. It doesn’t take a genius to suss out that Lucy and John were once a couple. John offers Lucy a ride home, she accepts, and when he comes to collect her, Lucy and Harry are dancing closely, and now it’s John who is uncomfortable.
Song brilliantly sets the scene that becomes the crux of the movie—the age-old battle of the heart between love and money. Lucy tells Harry that she has a requirement for her next suitor: that he be rich, and if he’s filthy rich, even better. Still, despite being a struggling actor working as a “cater waiter” (like most actors), the chemistry between Lucy and John still exists years after their break up over being broke in the middle of a busy street. While both are tempted to go into Lucy’s apartment, the emotional price is simply too high.
No such issues exist when Lucy and Harry go on an unusually frank date, where both of them speak bluntly about what they want out of a relationship. Remarkably, the conversation is both transactional and romantic. Because Lucy thinks in mathematical terms for her clients and herself, she tries to explain to Harry why she isn’t right for him. Harry counters effectively by speaking with his own math, the math of partnerships. Lucy thinks she’s too far below his strata, but Harry doesn’t need her strata. When Lucy goes home with Harry to his swank Tribeca apartment, she’s quite possibly as turned on by the largesse surrounding their clinch as she is by her rakishly handsome clincher. Harry would seem to check all the boxes on Lucy’s equation-based list, despite the red flag of the possibility of emotional unavailability.
Materialists is, at its most base level, a romantic triangle film. However, that simple description, true as it might be, is incredibly reductive. The pragmatism I mentioned earlier is a subject of deep study. How does a woman with no significant inheritance coming, and a modest big city income, traverse the minefield of the heart when financial security is a genuine and prevalent issue? Lucy calls Harry “a unicorn,” but what if he’s a unicorn on paper only?
John may be dirt poor, living like an undergrad with two roommates (one who is a complete slob), and occasionally verbally volatile due to his frustrations with his bleak circumstances, but he is emotionally available. Lucy has to weigh her math against her heart. The math, which matches her matchmaking calculus, is focused on height, weight, attractiveness, and most importantly, income. Harry and John are full up on the first three measures, but John falls woefully short in present income and in future income potential.
When Lucy’s favorite client suffers abuse from a man Lucy matched her with, she finds her math not adding up. Genuine emotion can foul up our most carefully crafted calculus like nobody’s business, and Lucy’s numbers and figures are strewn across the floor of her heart and mind.
If what I’ve described sounds familiar, I suppose it is, but the magic is in the telling. Song’s film is so frank about modern dating and all the equations that go into our decision-making, including the very present issue of having what was once a healthy middle-class income that has increasingly become just enough to keep your head above water. The conversations between Lucy and Harry and Lucy and John are bracingly honest.
While I suppose a viewer could find the words shared between Lucy and her would-be suitors too uncommon in their honesty, Song’s setting more than alleviates that concern. Lucy, Harry, and John are at the point in their lives that if they aren’t truthful with themselves now, when will they ever be? Perhaps more importantly, who will they become?
Song is helped immeasurably by the performances of her three protagonists. Evans has his best role since the MCU made him famous, and he gives an achingly unsentimental performance, even when saying sentimental words. Pascal is terrific as a man who knows the worst of himself and hasn’t a clue how, or if, he can fix it. Still, the key to the film is Dakota Johnson, an actor I’ve enjoyed in numerous supporting roles (The Social Network, A Bigger Splash, and The Lost Daughter come to mind), but who has never been given a showcase like the one Song has provided for her here. Lucy is a much trickier part than one might think. She’s a character who could be easy to hate, given her relationship mathematics and her admission that financial assets are so crucial to her in a partner. It is to Johnson’s great credit that Lucy is so compelling and even worth rooting for, despite herself.
The film’s emotional apex is similar to Past Lives in that it occurs on the steps of an NYC walk-up apartment. However, this time Song takes a different path, one that is nearly as surprising as that of her masterful first film. In just two films, Song has proven herself to be the most artful purveyor of modern relationships in present-day cinema. All of the emotion is earned through artful writing, elegant lensing, and perfectly-pitched performances.
Much like Past Lives, Song has once again set her controls for the center of the heart. Once again, she does not miss.
Reel Reframe 