by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans, Zoe Winters
Intro:
... handles the breeziness and inviting charm of the standard rom-com with exquisite ease, but its real worth comes with its examination of the reality of finding romance, from the grand fantasies that keep audiences in their seats for films about it, to the aggressive trial-and-error involved in trying to find it in the real world.
Celine Song, whose feature debut Past Lives took an age-old romance trope and infused it with nuanced philosophising, approaches the more traditional rom-com in much the same way. In Materialists, her and DP Shabier Kirchner’s visualisation of the duelling opulence and scraped-together existence that is life in New York City owes a lot to the aesthetics of Nora Ephron, and the scripting examines the brutal classism and economics of coupledom much like Jane Austen. Except, Song dives deeper into what those two aspects truly say about the idea of finding love, where we have (mostly) progressed beyond older standards for what counts as a fulfilling life for women, yet still view relationships through a transactional lens.
Taking inspiration from her own experiences working as a matchmaker, Song and star Dakota Johnson’s perspective on modern dating is brutal in its cynical depiction of the dating scene. Song’s scalpel-edge scripting is still in effect here with the characters, but she also applies it directly to the trappings of the material world, where a person’s worth is dependent on who they are with and what they can bring to that relationship. They are only worth what someone else is willing to pay, essentially.
While its marketing and initial plot developments set this up as a love triangle, Materialists is quite emphatically all about Johnson’s Lucy and her character arc. Pedro Pascal is perfectly cast as the ‘Unicorn’ that meets every impossible standard for a good date, and Chris Evans shows suitable working-class charm, but the film overall doesn’t examine the story through the lens of which suitor she should end up with. Instead, it presents a woman so data-pilled that she is unable to see her own worth as a woman, thrown into chaos over her job and her capacity for relationships, and finding relief not in the arms of the requisite love interest, but in realising that matters of the heart can’t be quantified so easily.
Materialists handles the breeziness and inviting charm of the standard rom-com with exquisite ease, but its real worth comes with its examination of the reality of finding romance, from the grand fantasies that keep audiences in their seats for films about it, to the aggressive trial-and-error involved in trying to find it in the real world. It maintains the writer/director’s interest in what infatuates, which made Past Lives so special, but expands it to a societal level, asking confronting questions about what people are really looking for in others. It doesn’t submit to pure fantasy, nor does it assume that being defeatist and realistic are the same thing; it just admits that love is a joy and terror beyond numbers, and wanting what we truly want is the bravest thing we are capable of.
