'The Materialists' review

There are spoilers, if you care about things of that nature.

Math was always my best subject in school. In general, school was very easy for me; I would crank out my homework on the bus ride home and anything I didn’t finish, I figured I was not meant to. By the time I got off the bus, it was my time, and that meant riding my Razor scooter around the block in circles singing Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” and Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker” to myself for two or three hours while I waited for the neighborhood kids finished their homework, which they would labor over, for some reason.

Anyway, my point is math is my natural state, that I am a numbers person. I can do moderately complex algebra in my head in the time it takes me to reach for my phone and open my calculator app, which then makes me annoyed that I bothered to reach. As such, I have spent an inordinate time of my life trying to use math to make my life easier. I am constantly trying to game out situations and scenarios; running numbers in my head makes me feel like I have control over things that are uncontrollable.

For instance, I hate starting any project unless I know exactly how long it would take me. I know that when I’m screenwriting, I can write about five pages an hour if the outline works, half that if I’m outlining while writing. I know that I can film 5 pages in a day with a digital camera while working at a brisk but comfortable pace.

But during COVID lockdown, I decided I wanted to go through every nook and cranny of my apartment and do a big sort-out, which I hadn’t done in years. It took me four years to even start because I was so overwhelmed by the fear of not knowing simply how long this project would take. I am not good at diving into mess and just seeing what happens; this produces great emotional distress in my soul and causes me to suffer deeply. Believe me when I tell you I have spent countless hours trying to Moneyball every single aspect of existence into its most efficient form—how long does it take me to get ready in the morning? 108 minutes to do everything I would like to do, 43 minutes if I need to economize. I know I need to drink 13 glasses of spring water¹ a day to stay hydrated at my current weight, not taking into account accommodations for the effects of caffeine or exercise, which I have further standard calculations which I do every single day based on how much of either I do that particular day. This is how I live my life. It is exhausting and debilitating and I do not recommend it to anyone.

I know that my intense desire to quantify every aspect of my life is a pathological stress response after a lifetime of living in fight-or-flight, a need to control the unpredictability of life’s curveballs, and it’s something I have endeavored to break out of, but it is, at this point, who I am.

After 36 years of interpersonal relationships, I also know that who I am is a person who is considered by most to be abnormally emotional. I wish I could give you a numerical figure of degree as to how emotional I am compared to others, but this is not something I have been able to assign numbers to, another thing that has caused me great emotional distress over the years. The dichotomy between having an intensely volatile emotional landscape and an equally intense need to put everything into neat logical rational boxes is something that continues to traumatize me daily and which has fascinated and amused numerous people with PhDs and MDs that I have done my best with whom to be open.

But you came here not to read about my myriad daily internal battles but, in fact, to read about the latest film from A24, The Materialists, the second film from director Celine Song, starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. Johnson stars as Lucy, a corporate executive at a matchmaking firm, “Adore Matchmaking,” who relies on data to turn the messy emotions and personal risk inherent in dating into simple equations: people either are, or aren’t, a good match. The film’s thesis is that Lucy is a good match on paper with wealthy finance hot guy Harry (Pascal) and not with her Bernie Sanders-supporting poor ex-boyfriend who lives in Brooklyn, John (Evans).

The Materialists’ first lie comes about half an hour into the film, when Lucy meets Harry, at his brother’s wedding (the bride was Lucy’s client). She is explaining to him the nuances of being a data-driven matchmaker, likening the profession to working in a morgue or an insurance brokerage: it’s just numbers. She asks Harry what his income is. He won’t tell her (rich) and she says she makes $80,000 a year and asks if his income is more or less than hers. Given her wardrobe, her apartment, the fact that she works with wealthy clients, and the open floorplan West Village vibe of “Adore Matchmaking”, that simply cannot be. I know the economy sucks in real life, but this film has already proven to not take place in the United States of America of today, but in a fantasy version where everyone who thinks electing Kamala Harris would have solved everything are right. This woman makes at least $250,000 a year. She works for a data startup. You know they sell their data!!! This is capitalism. The lies will only continue from here.

For the first five scenes of the film leading up to this point, we are told over and over again just how good Lucy is at her job. She is Michael Clayton for wealthy singles. She can take the ugliest, meanest piece of shit out there and get them married in six months. When Harry’s brother’s soon-to-be wife is experiencing cold feet, Lucy is able to convince her into going through with her marriage by making the bride feel like this man makes her feel valuable (more on that in a little bit), and furhter, by making the bride feel like it was her idea that he makes her feel valuable.

Lucy tells Harry how easy her job is, and he replies that she’s just good at it. Harry wants to date Lucy but Lucy is scouting him as a potential client. He’s a unicorn! Multiple characters say this multiple times, as occurs with all points the film is trying to make. Tall, fit, handsome, rich, tasteful, perfect.

Harry asks Lucy what she wants to drink. She says she wants a Coke and a beer which is an insane thing to order, especially at a wedding, but she is immediately provided these two beverages because her ex-boyfriend John who is a cater waiter² at the wedding. The beer glass is only half full, which drove me absolutely crazy. I thought about it for most of the rest of the movie. Did he drink the rest while walking it over? If a waiter brought me a half-full glass of beer I would be absolutely livid, especially if it was my ex-boyfriend who brought it to me. And I don’t mean that the head took up half the glass. There was no head to the beer. It was a half-full glass. You could see through the top 55% of the glass clearly. He brought her a used glass of beer.

This attention to detail, or lack thereof, is emblematic of the talent of the film’s director, Celine Song.

The Materialists opens with a shot of a lush, green canyon in the past: we, the audience, then have the pleasure of witnessing humanity’s first marriage. “Oh, brother,” I thought. “She just can’t help herself with this bullshit.” Song’s first film Past Lives, was, for some reason unknown to my eyes and mind, widely praised. It was named the best film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics, a group which in the past had bestowed that honor upon films such as Persona, Nashville, and Yi Yi.

Because I saw that film clearly, unlike most of my contemporaries, I do not feel that The Materialists is a step backwards the way that they do. To me, it is simply Song’s next film, of equal quality, which is to say there were elements that were inoffensive and elements that made me laugh out loud (dramatic elements, I mean).

The cinematic aspects of the film are boring to me. I don’t even want to dwell on them, they aren’t bad enough to be discussed, nor good enough to be remembered. The lighting is flat, the acting is flat, the writing is flat. I’ve seen people compare this film to the work of people like James L. Brooks and Nora Ephron. I suppose the film does share some cosmetic DNA to the work of Brooks as it aspires to the same laid-back sense of both narrative and visual design, but lacks the intelligence and soul that Brooks brings to the best of his work. But to compare this film to Ephron is completely off the mark and frankly offensive to the dead.

But we all know, the technical elements of any film are not what make a film bad. There are plenty of brilliant, classic films that want for perfection in their execution. The Materialists’ aforementioned flatness, the occasionally baffling mise en scène, the equally baffling turns in narrative (it becomes a spy thriller for two non-consecutive scenes???), are not what makes this film bad. This movie is bad because the characters are nonexistent, and the emotional stakes puddle-deep. The film makes its aims too obvious: Lucy has more chemistry with John, but she sees herself with a guy like Harry. Wow, I wonder who ever will she ever pick!!

The two leading men in particular have no personality. In lieu of dramatizing scenarios or depicting images which might demonstrate their personalities to us, they lifelessly spew dialogue that gestures towards them. In one ear and out the other! Celine Song’s favorite movie is Zootopia.

Speaking of the leading men, I’ve never really understood Chris Evans as a performer. Granted, I’ve only seen one Marvel film he’s been in (the first Captain America) and maybe if I’d seen more I would have a better understanding of him and his alleged star power. All I know is, when I was famously the VFX assistant on Snowpiercer, he did not say hello to me whenever he came in and I would have to run the latest cut for him. Further, I do not care for the way his eyes sit on his face, and the way his upper lip frames his teeth is borderline offensive to me. That said, he has a perfect nose and I found him to have an easy charisma in this film, so long as he was not being asked to act.

Pedro Pascal is, at my most generous, miscast here. I think he is strongest as a comedian, and his performance is best served in the rare moments where he is allowed to be funny, as in the scene in the kitchen at the end of the second act of the film after Lucy lingeringly touches Harry’s leg scars from surgery to make him taller. His eyes come to life for the first time in this scene, demonstrating how tall he used to be, and the audience was really laughing! The only intentional comedy in the film to induce the desired reaction at my screening. But in most of the film, he is woefully restrained by not having quality material to perform to begin with.³

To the point of capturing Pascal’s authentic inner life, however fleetingly, the filmmaker I thought of most while watching The Materialists was not Brooks nor Ephron but rather, Jean-Luc Godard, who died by assisted suicide in 2022, probably after reading the script for The Materialists and seeing what the future of his beloved medium was coming to. Godard’s work endures and enthralls because of that exact authenticity which is almost entirely lacking in this film. His early work did not feature any novelty of narrative, no uniqueness of incident, but they were performed and filmed with a spontenaity and joie de vivre so particular and specific, a sense of indivuality which Song does not seem to realize exists in human behavior.

At the end of See You Friday, Robinson, which is not a film credited to Godard but which features a substantial amount of self-recorded footage of the man, Godard sits at a table, pontificating on something or other, when he puts his hand inside of his shirt to use it to towel up some spilled liquid off of the table. It is the kind of intimate, human, spontaneous gesture which populated six decades of his groundbreaking work, and something which Lucy, Harry, and John would never do. Never! There is always a paper towel nearby if you step on your roommate’s used condom on the kitchen floor (a scene in which the depiction of “poor” is done via shaky cam).

The Materialists is not a good movie but it is a real movie. My friends and I often delineate contemporary releases as being “a real movie” or “not a real movie.” There is a matrix—good vs. bad, real vs. not real. Wicked is not a real movie, but I enjoyed it. The Materialists is a real movie, but I did not enjoy it. I suppose what I mean by “a real movie” is that it depicts a world that feels whole, that doesn’t remark upon itself as kitsch, that does not try to be anything it isn’t. I’ve never really tried to put the concept into words and it is now 1 o’clock in the morning, so that is the best I can do! I should cut this paragraph anyway, but I am not going to.

The film has themes, as it reminds you via dialogue in every single scene. It is about self-worth, and the way that romantic partners make you, as a person, feel valuable or disposable, and juxtaposing that concept against literal economic value, wealth vs. poverty.

The film tells us that what seems valuable on paper may not be valuable to the soul. This is depicted quite bizarrely in the film’s MacGuffin, the rape of “Sophie L.”⁴ Sorry to be woke, but I find it totally disgusting to use the sexual assault of a tertiary character, one of Lucy’s clients, as a method to induce spiritual growth in our protagonist. The data didn’t reveal “Mark P.” to be a rapist, so what good is the data, Lucy wonders while in a beautiful sun dress. He was designated a valuable man, yet he made “Sophie L.” feel disposable… which made Lucy feel disposable… There is so much to learn in this life.

Towards the end of the film, Lucy and the poor one drive upstate and crash a wedding and fall back in love, except that they are clearly still in love when he brings her that shitty beer a full hour prior.

At this point, realizing the film had nothing else to give me, I began reflecting on my own romantic track record of late. I have not been in love in five years. To my recollection, I have not slept with anyone more than once in that time. I have not been courted by a man, wealthy or poor, in, I don’t know, eight years. These were intentional choices I made, to spend as long as I needed alone to focus on my sense of identity and my own self-worth. It is only in the past three months that I feel I am ready to date again. (Anyone know a good matchmaker? lmao)

At the wedding they were not invited to, Lucy and John fight. Lucy doesn’t know why John still loves her. She says she’s materialistic (title alert!), judgmental, and cold. But John does love her, anyway. I am all of those things, also. Further, I am vain, manipulative, and shallow.⁵ I expect to be wealthy, whether by career or marriage, and I expect my future soulmate to be Perfect On Paper, despite being a veritable petrie dish of mental illness and physical disrepair myself. No man has ever loved me for my negative qualities, the way John loves Lucy for hers, and no one has ever wanted me back in spite of them. Why does she get to win, when I don’t? I have done five years of work on myself, while Lucy merely gets upset that she matched a client with a rapist and that is apparently enough of a spiritual change for her to now deserve unconditional love. This is the final lie of The Materialists.

Prior to this scene, when Lucy needs someone to talk to (about the rape of her client, and how that affects her), she calls John, not Harry. She knows she does not love Harry, but she also knows she loves John, and she knows she can confide in him and will receive the exact support she needs. This past week, I had two full days that I would rank among the top ten loneliest days of my entire life and I had no one to call. Lucy had two options of men who love her to confide in. I had no one. I eventually did talk to my friends about what I was going through and had a good cry, but in those two days I could not see the forest for the trees. I did not feel valuable, to anyone. I, too, felt disposable.

I have friends and family who love me unconditionally, who I rationally know would be there for me if I had just picked up the phone and called, but I did feel entirely adrift without a romantic partner to call and confide in these two days.⁶ Why is it that unconditional love isn’t actually enough, why is it that unconditional love must be supported by an underlying desire to fuck each other for it to feel truly unconditional, truly whole?

The Materialists, as bad and boring as it was, did have me considering this question. I suppose, to me, that makes the film valuable, not disposable. Because of this, I am certain that in three years I will rewatch this movie, and wonder if I was too hard on it. Because it made me have thoughts that I do not know how to reconcile, which is what art is for. The Materialists made me really consider what is probably the last great big volatile emotional equation of my life that I have yet to solve. I don’t yet know how to assign numbers to this question but I’m hopeful, with another 36 years of data, I might be able to figure it out.

1. 16 glasses if it’s from the tap.

2. He is an actor, and later receives a stipend from his bad play which makes him feel rich.

3. I don’t really have anything to say about Johnson, who comes out of the film unscathed, but neither does she do anything worthwhile with her screentime.

4. Every time they referred to a client as “FirstName, LastInitial” I wished I had a gun to shoot at the screen.

5. Scorpio sun, Aquarius rising.

6. Sabrina Carpenter haters hate me too!