★★½ (2½ out of 4)
Did you ever pop a champagne cork and then try to put the fizz back in the bottle? Impossible, right? The same goes for a romcom. You can’t create one without the romance and the comedy.
"Filmmaker Celine Song dons a metaphorical technician’s coat, does a chemistry test on three gorgeous movie stars—Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal—and then waits for the lab results. Sad to say, the romcom fizz didn’t make it."
Don’t get me wrong. You can take a crack at it, which is what writer-director Celine Song does with keen, analytical intelligence in “Materialists.” She dons a metaphorical technician’s coat, does a chemistry test on three gorgeous movie stars—Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal—and then waits for the lab results. Sad to say, the fizz didn’t make it.
That, of course, could have been Song’s intention all along. The South Korean born Canadian filmmaker won universal praise along with best picture and best screenplay Oscar nominations (the first Asian woman to do so) for her 2023 debut film, “Past Lives,” about two childhood friends from Korea who reunite as adults in New York City where she’s a playwright married to an American writer. A perfect setup for a love triangle.
In “Materialists,” New York is also the location for a trio of lovers. This one pivots around Lucy (Johnson, bringing a harder edge to her usual evanescence), a thirtysomething matchmaker for a company called Adore that pays her 80 grand a year. You try living on that in the Big Apple. It’s a struggle, but Lucy is no longer struggling with John (Evans), the actor/caterer-waiter boyfriend she broke up with after five years of arguing about money or the lack of it.
At a posh wedding for a couple whose marriage Lucy arranged, Lucy meets bachelor Harry, played to the manner born by Pascal as the epitome of hotness. In a typical Hollywood romcom, it would be Flash! Bam! Alakazam! and off to the races. Instead, Lucy talks-talks-talks to Harry about the boxes he would check off as one of her clients, such as net worth, looks, height, age, desire for children and religious and political orientation. Harry, to his credit, talks-talks-talks about “intangibles,” the things that can’t be quantified on a list. The characters in “Past Lives” could barely complete a sentence, leaving meaning to emerge in the space between whispers. In “Materialists,” no one can shut the hell up.
It's a shock at first hearing clients blurt out their sexist, racist, greedy impulses. One bride-to-be, a role aced by Louisa Jacobson of “The Gilded Age,” confesses to Lucy that the main attraction she has for her potential groom is that his success makes her sister jealous. “There’s value in that,” she tells Lucy. Song knows of what she writes, having worked as a matchmaker herself before her own success kicked in.
“Materialists” sags at mid point when Song throws in a few jolts from out of nowhere to wake up audiences perhaps lulled by the list-making. Sexual violence and shocking body-horror surgeries feel more extraneous than organic to the characters, who roam the city streets, restaurants and hot spots that seem curiously uninhabited as if “Materialists” was shot during Covid. It wasn’t.
There’s also a curious emptiness in the film’s drift toward poverty as a higher calling. Though the camera offers a lustful embrace to Harry’s $12 million condo and its furnishings, John’s shabby digs with two revolting male roommates is presented as more real, more honest. Talk about stacking the deck. No knock on Evans for reducing Captain America to a struggling artiste. He’s not a stereotype, he’s just written that way. This is a guy who tells Lucy without irony, “When I see your face, I see wrinkles and gray hair and children that look like you.” By the end, “Materialists” becomes so anti-materialist that it emerges as something akin to the poverty porn gorgeously sung about in “La Bohème" and its rock star cousin “Rent.”
I expected more from Song than giving in to the romcom clichés she so vividly deconstructed for most of her film. Blending tenderness with steel is her secret sauce. Bring back happy endings, sure, but leave Song out of it. I felt like Cher in “Moonstruck” (a truly no-bull romcom) when she slapped a love-drunk Nic Cage and told him to snap out of it. “Love is surrender,” John tells Lucy. What kind of advice is that for a modern woman? And what kind of movie? Snap out of it, indeed.