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PaperclipPerfector
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Notes -
On Wednesday evening I went to see Celine Song's new film Materialists, her follow-up to 2023's critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated Past Lives, which I adored. The film concerns Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) a successful New York-based matchmaker who mostly caters to clients in their thirties and forties. While attending one of her client's weddings, she gets to talking to Harry (played by the omnipresent Pedro Pascal; seriously, he starred in like 1/3 of the movies being screened in that cinema that day), the wealthy brother of the groom whom she attempts to recruit as a client (but he has other ideas). She also runs into John (Chris Evans), an ex-boyfriend and aspiring actor she dumped years prior, and yet who visibly still holds a candle for her.
Right off the bat, let's manage expectations: it's not much like Past Lives, and it's nowhere near as good, but it's still worth a watch.
Past Lives was an intimate, semi-autobiographical character drama about romantic love and Song's own experiences as a Korean immigrant to the West. Here, Song attempts (not entirely successfully) to wed two wholly unlike genres. On the one hand, it's a cold, glassy-eyed and cynical dissection of the economics of modern dating and marriage, in which women marry purely to spite their younger sisters; in which successful career women in their thirties are passed over by their male peers in favour of gorgeous dullards fifteen or twenty years their junior (about whom they have the audacity to complain that they're "immature"); in which Lucy's prospective clients present her with laundry lists of traits their partner must have (no men under 5'11", no women with BMIs over 20). On the other hand, it's a conventional romantic fantasy, in which the female lead has to choose between a wealthy finance bro who's safe but makes her feel nothing, and a starving artist who sends her heart all a-flutter. (No prizes for guessing how she picks.) At times, the dialogue is just as intimate and piercing as anything in Past Lives; at other times, you feel like the characters are reading out choice quotes from /r/femaledatingstrategy. If you've spent enough time in redpill and PUA circles, some of the talking points are sure to inspire a shock of recognition: it's practically a femcel manifesto in cinematic form.
Sadly, Johnson and Evans have very little chemistry with one another. Part of this might just be because of the usual reasons actors don't have chemistry with one another, but I suspect a major contributing factor might be Evans himself. At the time of filming he was a 43-year-old playing a 37-year-old character: looking at his face, I got the distinct impression that he's undergone a lot of Botox and/or cosmetic surgery to maintain a youthful appearance. (No need to do this in his most famous role, for which he mostly wore a mask.) He hasn't gone full Bogdanoff by any means, but whatever procedures he has undergone make it very difficult for him to emote: his skin is simply stretched too tautly across his skull. It was hard for me to believe his character is going through the emotional torpor the screenplay wants me to believe he is when nothing below his cheekbones is conveying this. The fact that men undergoing painful and expensive cosmetic procedures to improve their status in the dating and jobs market is actually a plot point in the film makes me wonder if Evans's casting was intended as some kind of meta-joke.* Johnson's character admits to having had work done on her nose and breasts: I'm dying to know if this is also true of Johnson herself. Nose, perhaps; breasts, probably not.
Johnson and Pascal do have some chemistry with one another, but as my girlfriend pointed out, it's the chemistry you expect between a girl and her gay best friend, or perhaps a girl and her cool uncle. It was hard for me to believe they were romantically interested in one another, even if it's implied that Pascal's character is significantly older than Johnson's (although probably not quite as much as their IRL age gap of ~15 years).
A little funnier than Past Lives, but ultimately it didn't move me nearly as much, even though it was obviously meant to. While watching Past Lives I felt like I was watching real people going about their lives and having genuine conversations, a feeling I never got from Materialists, and I don't think that's just because of the increased star power Song has to work with: a lot of the aforementioned femcel dialogue felt extremely artificial and essayistic. Perhaps the most affecting part of the whole movie is when one of Lucy's clients has been sexually assaulted by a man Lucy set her up on a date with: she angrily throws Lucy's words in her face and tearily insists that she is deserving of love, no matter how much Lucy might urge her to keep her goals realistic. It was a heart-rending scene that has me tearing up a little just thinking about it now. Shame the romantic A-story couldn't inspire anything resembling that kind of raw emotion.
Another data point added to the viewing public's efforts to psychoanalyse Song and her presumably peculiar relationship with her husband, Justin Kuritzkes. Given that both Song's first movie and Kuritzkes's first screenplay (Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino) concerned love triangles between a woman and two men, these jokes have been ongoing for some time. Personally, I interpreted Materialists's romantic plot as a spirited defense of Song's decision to marry a sensitive, artsy boy, rather than a wealthy finance bro as her mother presumably wanted her to. At least she had the forethought to marry a successful artsy boy, instead of a loser like John.
*At one point, Lucy and Harry attend a play in which John is starring. A poster for said play mentions that it was written by Celine Song.
I wonder how much of the lack of chemistry is driven by the simple fact that Johnson and Evans are not good actors. Perhaps Song thought she could get something interesting out of them once they were taken away from comicbook crap?
I don't know if Chris Evans is a bad actor so much as out of practice. His post MCU run isn't exactly a Pattinson/Radcliffe-style rush to stretch himself.
This is the first real movie I've seen him in since like Knives Out (which he was fine in). The rest has been streaming slop like Ghosted and Gray Man that might as well be AI generated and he could probably do in his sleep.
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