‘Materialists’: Celine Song Gets It All Wrong

‘Materialists’, written and directed by Celine Song, is technically  a romantic comedy, but the movie neglects to include much humor. It feels strangely sour and grumpy, as though it were an adaptation of an article by a New York Times writer going through a particularly traumatic breakup. Song seems to want to make a statement on The Way We Live Now, but Materialists is oddly out of touch, and often seems like it takes place in an alternate reality.

Our heroine is Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, who is single in her late 30s despite being one of the most beautiful women in the world, with legs up to her neck. Lucy is a “matchmaker,” not the yenta type you see on Netflix shows, but a romcom-style matchmaker, a job like “wedding planner” or “morning TV show producer” that leads in these types of movies seem to have. Lucy isn’t an ordinary matchmaker, she’s an ace matchmaker, having achieved nine successful marriages for her clients. She works for a matchmaking company that seems to be as successful as a law firm, or at least as successful as Suicide Girls, populated by dozens of attractive young employees who seem to spend their entire lives running around the office screaming or eating cake at their desks.

MATERIALISTS ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Celine Song
Written by: Celine Song
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
Running time: 108 mins

At a client’s wedding, Lucy meets the brother of the groom. In reality, the brother stalks her, but because Pedro Pascal is playing the brother, it’s OK. Pascal is Harry (and hairy), a “unicorn” for matchmakers, because he’s charming, sensitive, and beautiful, and rich, though you never see him actually working. All he appears to do is eat at expensive sushi restaurants and lie around in silk sheets that would have been too gaudy for Dorothy Stratton. Chris Evans is also at the wedding, working as a “cater-waiter,” and we learn through a dumb flashback that he and Dakota Johnson were together for five years in their 20s but she dumped him because he is a broke actor who lives in Queens and drives an old Volvo. The love triangle goes into motion from there.

It’s a perfectly fine premise for a marshmallow-light romantic comedy, but the problem is that Celine Song is pretentious, to the extent that she brackets the movie with weird panoramas of cavemen falling in love. She got away with it in her Oscar-nominated first feature, Past Lives, because that movie had an indie vibe and also had the appealing premise of the heroine reconnecting with a lost love from her childhood in Korea. But Materialists feels as white as a Modern Love column, and Song gets lost in the weeds.

The main problem is that, as written, Lucy isn’t just flawed and quirky, like any good rom-com heroine. As screwed up as Kristen Wiig was in Bridesmaids, you wanted her to find her man. But Song’s Lucy simply comes across as weird, almost crazy, giving intense eyes and launching into intense sotto voce soliloquies about the meaning of love instead of having a conversation like a normal person. There’s an extremely bizarre and disturbing subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients whose matchmaking date ends up assaulting her in a bathroom. This is common, Lucy’s boss informs her. It happens to everyone all the time on matchmaking dates. Really? Are we watching a romcom or a season of True Detective?

This news understandably causes Lucy to have a crisis of conscience, but the boss tells her to stay away from the traumatized client. Lucy cannot, so instead she stalks the client, wearing a trenchcoat and a baseball cap, and combing back her bangs. Then, as soon as the client sees her, she says “Sophie, it’s Lucy!” like they’re six-year-olds about to meet up for a play date. Surprise! Poor Sophie, poor Lucy, poor us.

The movie spends a lot of time on Sophie’s trauma, but we only see her through Lucy’s eyes. Chris Evans’s John gets some screen time away from Johnson’s gaze, but all we see of him is that he’s poor, living in Withnail and I-like squalor with two gross roommates, way too late in life. Song seems to accept his poverty, but looks at it as tragic, not comic, a tonal problem that she also extends to a bizarre reveal about Pascal’s character in his final scene.

A romcom has to be funny. Celine Song is not funny. And if it’s not a romcom, then it has to exist in reality, but this movie doesn’t really do that, either. It just drifts about the city, vaguely plotted, genreless, dully heteronormative but not in a sexy way.

Clueless about money but obsessed with it, faithful to the romcom formula but totally lacking in jokes, Materialists will be a perfect addition for whenever a future knockoff of Mystery Science Theater 3000 decides to do a Dakota Johnson night. No contemporary screen actor deserves mocking more. Your girl looks fine, but she can’t pick a script to save her life. It’s hard to say what Song was thinking when she wrote this movie. Maybe she was researching spiders with Dakota Johnson’s mother in the Amazon right before she died.