The MATERIALISTS Newsletter

+ I ran out of subject line ideas

This newsletter contains minor spoilers for Materialists, now in theaters. If you’re still avoiding spoilers, consider instead telling me what you want to watch (or what you think *I* should watch).

That old record industry adage that you have your whole life to write your first record and six months to write your second is just as true in moviemaking. The difference is that when your first movie is a hit, you can get a budget with several million more dollars and your choice of actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“But Madame Web is Sony not Marv-” let me do my bit, okay?

This is the only way I can make sense of Materialists, Celine Song’s hotly anticipated follow-up to Past Lives (2023). A romantic drama with the beats, but not the jokes, of a comedy, Materialists follows Dakota Johnson’s Lucy, an elite matchmaker based in Manhattan. In the first twenty minutes of Materialists, Lucy establishes her core three tenets: she wants a rich husband, she believes marriage is a business arrangement, and she makes $80,000 a year. The problem with Materialists is that none of these things ever seem remotely true.

Lucy is being courted by two men, sophisticated financier Harry (Pedro Pascal) and her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans). Harry is so perfect you suspect he might be a serial killer; John is a cartoonishly broke failure who lives in the kind of urban squalor you normally only find in AI generated Facebook posts about woke millennials. They are both obsessed with Lucy. She seems vaguely over it.

Lucy at John’s apartment/Lucy at Harry’s apartment

Anyone who has been paying attention to the press tour can see that Johnson and Pascal have palpable, though platonic, chemistry. Johnson’s charm is intoxicating but her born-rich cool-girl affect is at complete odds with who the movie says Lucy is. As much as the film reminds us that Lucy grew up poor, Johnson offers about as much working-class grit as Lucille Bluth at Klimpy’s. 

The glamorous ease of Lucy’s wealth-adjacent life becomes all the more apparent when we meet her client, Sophie (Succession’s Zoe Winters, doing some seriously noble and unrewarding work). We’re told a dozen times that age is a woman’s key value in the dating marketplace but Sophie is only five years older than Johnson’s actual age and is totally excluded from the luxury that Lucy has casually acquired (and then casually dismisses). Sophie is not welcome in Lucy’s frothy indie movie fantasia: she’s trapped in an episode of Dateline, torn between an understandable yearning for lifelong companionship and the very real fear of abusive, violent men. 

Materialists is billed as a romantic comedy because while there aren’t really any jokes, there aren’t enough stakes to call it a drama. Lucy is not in danger of destitution, violence, or loneliness. The worst thing that can happen to her is eating at a Halal cart in Central Park. 

Materialists wants to feel like a modern take on the romcom, a genre that is said to be dead or revitalized every three years. We are meant to be shocked by Lucy’s cynical realism; Harry is taken aback when she, a minute into meeting him, asks how much money he makes. Lucy mocks men who consider dating “woman stuff,” but she’s the one who never takes it seriously. Johnson is just too aloof, too genre-aware, too smirking.

While watching her, I kept think of Pauline Kael’s quip about Peter Fonda—“he doesn't have a core of tension; something in him is still asleep and perhaps always will be.” The delight of Johnson is that she has zero interest in even attempting tension. Her nodding to the camera is what made Madame Web and the Fifty Shades trilogy such excellent pieces of schlock. Lucy is never convincingly vulnerable enough to seem lovestruck, or even love-curious. It’s the people around her—Harry, Sophie, John, even the first client whose wedding Lucy attends—who are the ones humiliated and humbled.

Lucy’s tepid disinterest in her circumstances is the most subversive thing about Materialists, a movie that is otherwise pretty trad in its message about the earth-shattering proposition of a middle class white woman marrying for love. But Materialists doesn’t call for a Tashi-from-Challengers-esque manipulator. It calls for an ice queen who secretly daydreams about twee cavemen marriages and eventually melts, a little, for true love. That never shows up in Johnson’s performance or in Song’s longwinded script.

In both Past Lives and Materialists, Song’s storytelling tends towards the broad and shallow. Her movies deal with archetypes rather than characters, but Past Lives chose ones more palatable to an indie moviegoing audience. Nora (Greta Lee) is a successful working artist played by a comedienne who did a Calvin Klein campaign. Lucy is a snob played by a former Gucci brand ambassador. Nora was caught between a hunky, taciturn childhood friend (Teo Yoo) and an easygoing short king (John Magaro). Lucy’s left with a probable sociopath and a bum living in a Bushwick trap house. 

I am a fan of both actresses but this is undeniably giving avg Mamdani voter vs avg Cuomo voter (I wrote this before the election)

Past Lives was an approximation of romantic dramas like In The Mood for Love and Before Sunset. The flatness of the main characters, the thinness of their pursuits and their relationships, just made them more tragic and pathetic. But Materialists is working from a tradition of screwball marriage plot comedies that goes back to Austen. When you strip down a clown, you just get a less funny clown.

Song has quickly become beloved in critical circles but I’ve found both her films flimsy. There’s not much to them besides a logline—like Harry’s giant, impersonal apartment, her movies have obvious intent but hollow execution. She has an authorial taste I think would actually work better on a larger canvas than a three-hander domestic drama. Song’s the rare indie director that I can easily imagine directing a Disney tentpole. If they ever make a live-action Atlantis, John Magaro would make an excellent Milo.