Jason Bailey
There was a moment, midway through a scene that falls around the end of the first act of Materialists, where I realized I had leaned forward in my seat, anxious not to miss a word. Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker, is out on a date with Harry (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy finance guy. They’ve been out a few times already, and they seem to have good chemistry, and they’re certainly physically compatible, but she’s doing what she’s been doing since he first made a move: explaining why they’re a bad match. “At the end of the day, the math doesn’t add up,” she tells him, specifically pinpointing the vast divergence in their income and familial wealth. “I’m just a girl who works,” she says. “I’m not a girl you marry.”
Celine Song (Past Lives), the writer/director, plays much of the scene in a medium-wide two-shot, without cutting in for coverage. She’d rather let the pauses and implications hang heavily in the air, allowing both the actors and the characters to genuinely interact, talking and listening and regarding each other. And that give-and-take is vital, because Materialists is a very rare thing in mainstream American movies: a story (always implicitly, but often explicitly) about class.
To be clear, Song does not sneak this in, so late in the picture; it’s right there in the title, and in the painfully candid scenes of Lucy commiserating and strategizing with her colleagues at the upscale New York matchmaking agency where she works. They talk about their clients like what they are: products, to be bought and sold, and therefore to be properly marketed, which is where Lucy comes in. It is, to be sure, a challenging profession; everyone has a long checklist of non-negotiable qualities, from height to hair to politics to (especially) income, and lest we need a reminder of how this can all be done impersonally, the first client call we hear includes the phrase “I would never swipe right on a woman like that.”
But Lucy is good at what she does—an early scene, talking a nervous bride down off the ledge, is just a perfect bit of character explanation—and that’s partially because she doesn’t date. She is “the eternal bachelorette” (a descriptor to which she adds, “voluntary celibate”), and that challenge may be, at least at first, what draws her to Harry, who swaps place cards to sit next to her at the singles table at the wedding of one of her success stories. They hit it off right away, and then, somewhat inconveniently, she runs into John (Chris Evans).
One of the most striking qualities of Song’s intelligent screenplay is how, in this era of painfully on-the-nose expositional dialogue (“How long has it been?” a lesser writer might have them say), she lets us figure out what Lucy and John’s Whole Deal is. There’s clearly history hanging in the air between them, as evidenced by their meandering dialogue and intimate yet uncomfortable body language (as we know, Song is very good at dramatizing longing), but she lets us read between the lines until a well-placed flashback shows us their break-up, on their fifth anniversary of dating. It was apparently about money, which neither of them had, and which appeared to be an ongoing source of conflict and tension.
And so there we have the “who will she choose” set-up, and while it’s certainly not an original one (or a terribly unpredictable one either), it’s executed here with grace, wit, and a minimum of nonsense. The acting is top-tier, and not just from the leads; Zoë Winters (so good as Kerry Castellabate on Succession) is fantastic as Lucy’s trickiest client, and John Magaro packs a full backstory and characterization into what seems, initially, like an in-joke voice-over appearance. But Materialists rests on the shoulders of its three leads, and their casting is reminiscent of old-school, Golden Age of Hollywood stars—they (and Song) are using their personas, and the baggage they bring with them, to the benefit of the story, as a kind of shorthand. None of them are doing anything you haven’t seen before, but they’re doing it in genuinely affecting ways. Especially in the early scenes, Song seems to take particular pleasure in watching them listen to each other, letting their eyes be ours, not only by preferring two-shots to close-ups, but eschewing conventional coverage patterns to linger on the actor after they’ve finished their line, so that we see them reacting and engaging.
This is particularly helpful with Johnson, who has always been a top-tier reactor (her non-verbal responses are part of what elevate the Fifty Shades movies from unwatchable to strangely riveting). Song doesn’t write simple characters, and perhaps her most noteworthy achievement here is letting Lucy be, in many ways, a (self-described) “awful person” — an imperfect protagonist, sometimes perilously so. Late in the picture, she answers the question “why does anyone get married?” with eye-opening, borderline discomforting candor; in the next scene, when John asks if she thinks he’s “worthless” or “disposable,” we preemptively cringe, because she might give him an answer we don’t expect from a romantic drama.
And that might be what’s most refreshing about Materialists, which A24 is marketing (probably wisely) as a romantic comedy: it’s decidedly not about romance. Love is, if anything, a distraction for these people at this point in their lives, a deterrent, immaterial and unimportant. That makes it a marked divergence from Song’s Past Lives, which was so heartbreakingly romantic, and that might make some audiences resist this follow-up. It does not equal her stunning debut, but it’s not trying to replicate it either; she’s doing something new, and riskier. In the process, she’s made a piercing movie about grownups, for grownups—and that’s nearly as rare these days.
B+
“Materialists” is in theaters Friday.
