Since reserving my tickets one month ago for the first showing of Materialists, I’ve been managing my expectations. Celine Song’s cinematic follow-up to her Best Picture-nominated Past Lives—my favorite film of all time—could never meet my impossible expectations. Even while walking into the theater today, I whispered It’s not Past Lives to myself under my breath.
As anticipated, Materialists fails to approach its predecessor, but I found myself increasingly shocked by the film’s inability to charm me. Although the work is undeniably Song’s, as evidenced by the exquisite framing, New York setting, and pregnant pauses, Materialists is everything Past Lives was not: a sterile, shallow story with stilted, repetitive dialogue and distancing performances unable to worm its way into my heart’s borough, let alone neighborhood.
The craziest part: I suspect this was all by design.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a successful matchmaker in New York. While attending the wedding between two clients, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a smooth and wealthy equities trader who’s immediately smitten with her, as well as John (Chris Evans), a part-time actor she once dated who’s catering for the wedding. The former courts her, showing her the luxuries her working-class wallet can only dream of, while the latter stokes memories of a relationship soured by empty savings accounts. As Harry pulls Lucy into his orbit, John keeps reappearing, throwing her love life and career into chaos. Meanwhile, after a dark incident at the service, Lucy begins to question the work she does and everything she believes about love.
Whereas Past Lives floated on Song’s romantic warmth toward all spectra of love, Materialists sinks like lead in the river. By virtue of her profession, Lucy approaches love as a commercial venture, treating it as a business defined by risk. Conversations in intimate settings become negotiations, moments of pleasure with the strapping and immaculately attired Harry confined to flitting glances and observed opulence. The script enforces this romantic remove, with line deliveries cold and intensely formal; the film lacks passion, oozing sterile corporate polish. As we glimpse a play explicitly written by Song within the story where the actors speak the same way, it’s clear this is an intentional choice, but that doesn’t diminish how off-putting it sounds.
Making matters worse is Johnson, whose every line delivery sounds as alien to me as it did in Madame Web. I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s a consistent struggle I have with her performances, and it’s exacerbated here by how deliberate it is: Lucy performs at all times in her life, posturing and pleasing wealthy clients to assure their cooperation and subscription, leaving her words as authentically human as an LLM’s. Honestly, it’s not just her—Evans struggles to render his dialogue naturally as well. He’s charming, of course, and his John is the only emotionally available vertex in our triangle, but awkwardness clings to his addresses. Only Pascal escapes unscathed; his character is in permanent woo mode while performing opposite Johnson, but there’s a warmth and curiosity Pascal exudes that Johnson never matches, and he’s simply more adept at reading those lines by Song.
Another struggle with Materialists comes via its plotting, which veers away from the Lucy-Harry-John triumvirate several times. Dancing around spoilers, I’ll say that I admire the gritty, realistic intrusions regarding her client Sophie (Zoe Winters), some of which cut through the shallow story like a knife, but that I call them “intrusions” points to the problem: they don’t flow organically into Lucy’s saga so much as inject a secondary concern to investigate and elicit character growth. They’re essential, but they feel wholly contrived.
No problem is larger than the film’s absence of subtlety. Past Lives won me over with its profundity despite economy: Song’s story and the expressive performances by Greta Lee, Teo Yoon, and John Magaro create a lived-in world with incredible depth, needing so few words that it stuns me. Rich thematic takeaways are abundant, with diverse and challenging messages woven together into a delicate but moving braid. Materialists, on the other hand, bleats its messaging at the audience in every conversation, inverting the deft rationing of tell and show from her previous work. I feel smart while watching Past Lives; I leave the film itching to discuss and explore. In this new entry, Song isn’t conventional, but she drops any pretense of trusting her audience. The deepest insights come from Winters’ character in the C plot, but even those are explicitly (and repeatedly) articulated.
I sound like a sourpuss, I know, but Materialists isn’t without redeeming qualities. The film looks stunning across a wide swath of locations, earning visual acclaim in high-end apartments, collaborative offices, and open barn wedding venues (that you know will feature soft outdoor string lights). The score proffers emotion that the film withholds, the costuming reinforces character and class in vital ways to this story, and Song projects perfectly framed artwork from start to finish. While this film clings to New York City more than its predecessor, we’re once again gifted fantastic park vistas and intimate shots of apartments and stoops I’d love to visit. I’ll also tip my hat to Song for taking risks, most notably the temporal shift that bookends the story proper. That move feels atonal and awkward to me, but I admire the idea behind it.
As one of the biggest fans of Song and Past Lives out there, my being down on the Materialists is inevitable. Past Lives touched me in personal ways while also telling complex, heartfelt tales about love, time, and origins simultaneously; this one carries lofty aspirations and has a lot to say about love, capitalism, and expectations, but it evokes Will Smith’s Hitch without any of the humor. It pains me to call this a step back, but Materialists is that: a romantic drama that strips away the romance and includes only low-energy sequences in hopes of warmly landing a far better—but still imperfect—conclusion. It isn’t Past Lives, and even worse, I’m not sure it’s even a good movie worthy of this many words. Like the film, that observation brings me almost no pleasure.
Save for one: there’s nowhere to go but up from here.
I look forward to watching her next film.
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