‘Materialists’ Review: Celine Song’s Meditation on the Nature of Love
While it may not be as narratively and thematically strong as Past Lives, Celine Song still delivers a jaw-droppingly affecting meditation on love and its intrinsic connection to life with Materialists.
I came out of Celine Song’s follow-up to the incredible Past Lives, with Materialists, relatively cold. I liked it, but wasn’t crazy about it, compared to how her feature directorial debut affected me profoundly. However, on the drive back home, the film grew in me in ways I never imagined, as I began to ruminate on the significance of her jaw-dropping photography, and how she communicates centuries of romance with her modern-day love triangle, between matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), aspiring actor John (Chris Evans), and millionaire Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal).
There’s something so deeply affecting about how Song moves her camera in moments of raw intimacy, notably the sequence where Lucy and John reunite together at a wedding. Collaborating once again with ace cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, Song blocks a shot-reverse-shot exchange between the two protagonists, as they smoke cigarettes and look at each other for the first time in a long time. The cigarettes mean something, more than the act of smoking itself, especially as the scene begins with Lucy opening her case to light one up, letting John do it for her, as she looks at him in pure admiration. They were once a couple, and are still in love with each other, but don’t seem ready to admit this inextricable fact until much later, as the film progresses.
Yet, before even getting to that point, Song strikingly cuts to a scene from their past, where their relationship gets fractured. They broke up over the most ridiculous thing, but haven’t spoken since. The cigarette exchange is their first real conversation, we realize, since their fateful split. As Lucy and John both take deep, long drags, they recognize a “spark” is still left in their relationship, but leave it at that. It’s clearer-than-clear that Song’s movie, which swerves in a thousand different directions in its 117-minute runtime, focuses on Lucy’s own search for love, as her job is to ensure her clients find “the right match.”
But who is this “right match” in the eyes of our protagonist? This is the question at the center of Song’s thesis, which unpacks itself in often beautifully poetic ways, even if she has difficulty balancing a register of tones this time around, especially when juggling difficult sections between more light-hearted, humorous montages of Lucy finding perfect matches for her clients. However, I was more taken aback by how Song and Kirchner moved – and blocked – their 35mm camera, which frequently created images with real lyrical power, notably during its opening and ending scenes that bookend the cyclical nature of love. From that moment on, I knew that the movie would be just as good as Past Lives, even if it may not be as strong, regardless of the narrative inconsistencies Song now deals with.
Song emphasizes silences and how a person looks at another than the dialogues themselves, to make us feel the closeness of Lucy’s relationship with John, as it rekindles, or with Harry, as it begins to blossom. The writer/director plays with well-known romantic comedy tropes, and never turns them on their head, or does anything different with what has already been established. It’s as clichéd as you might think a love story like this will work. However, she never falls prey to some of the traps that many rom-coms perpetuate. Notably, each character presented within Song’s universe is deeply human and empathetic, and feels grounded in the world we live in, compared to some of the more idealized versions of what a man and woman should act as “the perfect couple” on screen.
They are not perfect, nor are the relationships Lucy has. Harry may be “the perfect match” at first glance, and Pedro Pascal certainly revels in a bit of scene-chewing fun as he gets introduced with a suave move to get close to Lucy, but his flaws begin to reveal themselves as she spends more intimate time with him. When that scene occurs, the dramatic power isn’t intense, but still deeply felt through Song’s deeply humanistic lens, as the two look at each other and realize why they may (or may not) be “the perfect match.” Song never judges her character’s actions. She shows them as they are, with their imperfections, without trying to make them “screen perfect.”
We understand how difficult it is for Lucy and John to speak to each other honestly, the same way Harry attempts to masquerade his imperfections until he is unmasked by Lucy. It makes for a deeply investing, and surprisingly empathetic film, that’s often very funny in how it shows its human characters learning to love as they understand it’s the only element keeping our existence alive and functional. Without love, we’d all be dead. That’s not a theory, but a fact. Humans need love to grow as good human beings. The ones that don’t usually end up on a dark, unforgivable path. Love is the one thread that connects all humans, from prehistory (which Song illustrates during its opening scene, with the first ever proposal) to our contemporary society. It’s the one facet that, regardless of how shitty and unpredictable the world has now become, has not changed.
When you focus on that, and not its cliché-filled plot, Materialists has an equal amount of texture as Past Lives, though its inconsistencies stick out like a sore thumb. While Song was able to keep a specific tonality for her directorial debut, her sophomore feature seems a bit too jumbled in its midsection, as it quickly cuts from a harrowing description of assault (the perpetrator and the act are never seen, but are horrifyingly visualized enough when the doorbell of the victim’s home keeps ringing) to a haha funny montage where Lucy attempts to find matches for an array of people who have a long list of the demands. The scene itself is funny, but the tonal shift between a fairly heavy moment and a montage of vignettes doesn’t sit particularly well, especially as Song sidelines this very important plot thread until the film’s denouement, where it gets resolved.
However, when we get to that scene, the performance Zoë Winters gives in front of Dakota Johnson is more than heartbreaking and will devastate you into a million pieces. Perhaps that was the point, for Lucy to go on regardless of what has happened, especially when it results in such a sequence that is designed to make you feel some of the strongest emotions you may experience all year in front of a film. Yet, the narrative still feels less focused than her previous effort, even if it leads to scenes of an emotional apex so powerful it’s enough to make brick walls disintegrate.
Still, Song’s mastery of the filmmaking form can’t be overstated, while Johnson, Evans, and Pascal are all terrific and possess note-perfect alchemy together. Evans, in particular, seems to enjoy being in a real movie again after his post-Knives Out run filled his resume with nothing but junk. I’ve forgotten how funny he can be, especially in scenes set in his chaotic apartment, but the most dramatic registers of the actor are what struck me the most, notably in the latter half. Even Song manages to get a good performance out of Dasha Nekrasova in a bit part, something I never thought was possible. Celine Song truly has a magic touch.
That “magic touch” is what ultimately makes Materialists so special. Love is intrinsic to how we, as human beings, move in society and behave. Love will make us make crazy, wonderful, and sometimes devastating decisions. Love will sometimes unite the most unexpected people together in their shared appreciation of each other or the world they live in until death do them part…