Materialists: a rickety, unsettling rom com

The day before Materialists opened in the United States, its writer-director, Celine Song, posted a “movie syllabus” via A24’s social media account: an earnest attempt by a studious filmmaker to show her work. Song’s list of twenty-four titles came bookended by a pair of films by James L. Brooks, the past master of a mostly vanished Hollywood subgenre: the glossy, demographically broad you’ll-laugh/cry/hurl comedy-drama, deployed wholeheartedly (and Oscar-winning effect) by Brooks in 1983’s Terms of Endearment and then perfected in his follow-up Broadcast News (1987), the most obvious of Song’s stated influences and the platonic model of how to both plot a sharp-edged, multi-directionally sympathetic love triangle and set it against a very specific working-professional backdrop. 

The major issue with Materialists, which stars Dakota Johnson as an in-demand matchmaker servicing Manhattan’s most upwardly mobile penthouse dwellers is not that it comes in under the bar of Broadcast News, or any of its other Criterion Channel-ratified inspirations (The Age of Innocence (1993), Phantom Thread (2017), Yi Yi (2000)). It’s that on its own specific and scrupulously controlled terms, the film ends up feeling drained and bloodless, like a romp sucked dry by a vampire. The set-up is simple enough: after finding herself charmed by an almost comically eligible bachelor, Harry, (Pedro Pascal) at the wedding of one of her clients, Lucy is blindsided by the arrival – at the same event – of her ex, John (Chris Evans), who’s slinging drinks for the catering company. Here, Song distills the dichotomy between Lucy’s suitors – and the theme of her second feature as a whole – by having her heroine order a beer and a Coke simultaneously, beverages suggesting an indecisive woman caught in her own private thirst trap.

The decision to style Lucy as a self-conscious (and openly self-loathing) mercenary who talks about relationships – her own and those of her clients – in purely transactional terms suggests a filmmaker working in a deconstructionist vein, and Johnson, who has a beguiling quality of seeming alienated from everything and everybody around her (including her own line readings) is well cast as a woman who’s a little too good at reading the room. But taking something apart only matters if it’s standing in the first place, and Materialists is rickety stuff, buckling from beginning to end beneath its maker’s weighty aspirations. 

There was some real skill on display in Song’s debut, Past Lives (2024), where the two-guys-and-a-girl dynamics were tied to plangent matters of ethnic and cultural identity; the most moving scene featured one character sitting quietly while the others conversed impenetrably, in another language. In Materialists, the complications and psychology are class-based, and Song strives accordingly for screwball velocity, but the dialogue keeps missing the strike zone. “You must know a lot about love,” says Harry, sizing Lucy up. “I know a lot about dating,” she replies. To paraphrase another Brooks movie: that’s as good as it gets. The one-liners in Materialists are done no favours by the actors’ narcotised affect, a quality that could be construed as satire if all of the solipsistic monotony on display weren’t so accomplished. The more that Lucy, John and Harry articulate their desires – to be loved for who they are, not for the abundance or scarcity of their bank balances – the more one gets the impression of a filmmaker talking to herself, with dramaturgy as a form of autohypnosis.

The easiest things to criticise about Materialists, like the knowingly ridiculous prologue depicting pre-civilisation mating rituals (file this one under that other Brooks, Mel) and the overdetermined contrasts between its various locations (John’s roommates seem to have stumbled in from a crusty Judd Apatow movie), quail in the face of its most problematic element: a subplot about one of Lucy’s clients that drags the movie into treacherous dramatic territory, where it duly and spectacularly faceplants. Suffice it to say that the use of a genuine (and contextually resonant) crisis suffered by a supporting character as a spur to the protagonist’s guilty self-actualisation – i.e. a way to make her feel bad about a dubious vocation and its consequences – reminded me of another 21st century movie trying to recapture the (James L.) Brooksian spirit, and which is not on Song’s syllabus: Jason Reitman’s Up in Air (2009), another modern parable of commodified romance begging indulgence and empathy for the leisure class and lubricating bystanders’ tragedies beneath a veil of crocodile tears. The bizarre, unsettling tenor of Materialists’ final act is almost bracing, at least until it becomes clear that Song has nothing more radical in mind than absolution, and a happily-ever-after whose carefully appended asterisk is so small as to be imperceptible.

► Materialists is in UK cinemas 15 August.