They’ve been selling Materialists as a breezy romantic comedy, and a lot of people are going to feel hoodwinked when they see it. The fizzy escapism sold by the posters and trailers is quietly and sometimes uneasily undercut by cynicism, which is fitting for a story about someone who sells an idea of romance that she may not herself believe.
This is the second feature from writer-director Celine Song, whose Oscar-nominated Past Lives was unusually assured for a debut. Materialists isn’t as carefully measured or dramatically tidy as that film. It’s riskier and messier, and that sort of makes it the more interesting movie.
Like Past Lives, it’s about a woman, two men and a fork in the road. Her name is Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a professional matchmaker in New York City. She’s precise, analytical, unflappable. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, which means she doesn’t have any real problems.
Her clients come to her with the stats and specs of their ideal mates — weight, height, hairline, salary, age — and she finds them with the efficiency of a real estate agent. She knows how to close the deal, and she’s engineered more weddings than anyone else at her agency.
It’s at one of those weddings that Lucy begins an effortless flirtation with Harry (Pedro Pascal), the brother of the groom. It’s also where she reconnects with her ex, John (Chris Evans), who’s on the catering staff. John is also a struggling actor, and in flashbacks, we see that he and Lucy were constantly fighting about money. She wants a nice guy, yes, but is it too much to ask that he also be rich?
Harry, who has an ambiguous but well-paying job in private equity, checks the boxes. But there’s something pulling her back to John, perhaps because, like the returning childhood friend in Past Lives, he represents a tantalizing what-if.
The first half of Materialists, which is mostly about this low-stakes love triangle, is as silky smooth as thousand-thread count sheets. The actors have a terrific ease about them, and Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography envelops them in a warm glow. And then there’s a rupture — in Lucy’s career, in the life of one of her clients, in the feeling of the movie — and Song’s intentions become harder to pin down, as she uses the rom-com formula to interrogate the perils of 21st-century singledom. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
It’s a daring move, though it doesn’t totally work. Maybe it’s because the characters are so unwaveringly sincere and wet-eyed. The second half of the movie also has a heartbreaking supporting performance from Zoë Winters as a woman desperate for companionship. She’s drawn so incisively and in only a few minutes of screentime that you start to wonder if the whole thing should have been about her.
But I must admit there’s something exciting about realizing that a film isn’t going to do exactly what you thought, and Song is such a confident stylist and writes such crackling dialogue that I got pulled into it. The people are messy, vain, self-conscious, complicated, contradictory — and in the great tradition of romance, they’re smart about just about everything but romance. The film has a romantic pessimism about it, which is itself kind of romantic.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.