Materialists review: This non-romcom has the welcome oddness of a future classic
Director
:
Celine Song
Cert
:
15A
Starring
:
Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters, Martin Ireland, Dasha Nekrasova, Emmy Wheeler, Louisa Jacobson, Eddie Cahill, John Magaro
Running Time
:
1 hr 57 mins
In recent years the world has got confused as to what constitutes a romantic comedy. Every second review of last year's One Day described that David Nichols TV adaptation as such – most often abbreviating to 'romcom' – despite it plainly not being any sort of comedy. Did Richard Curtis accelerate this upending of cinematic taxonomy? At any rate, here we are.
Celine Song
's gorgeous, intelligent follow-up to her Oscar-nominated
Past Lives
offers a particularly knotty source of further confusion.
The director herself places Materialists within the genre. She lists pictures such as Annie Hall and Broadcast News as influences. It certainly has the shape of a romantic comedy. Dakota Johnson, still boasting the best hair this side of Renata Reinsve, stars as Lucy, a matchmaker plying her trade amid the dentists and lawyers of New York.
Attending a wedding, she bumps into a hugely wealthy – and, crucially as it transpires, tall – financier in the currently unavoidable form of Pedro Pescal. This Harry offers the perfect answer to a question she encounters every day. Every female client wants someone over 6ft; each wants someone as loaded as her new pal. But Lucy half-accidentally decides – rather than making merchandise of Harry – to keep him for herself. Meanwhile, John (Chris Evans), her likable, impoverished ex-boyfriend, an actor and waiter, lurks in the background with sad Basset-hound eyes.
READ MORE
They could once have made a cracking Doris Day flick from that scenario. Doris as the no-nonsense professional. Rock Hudson as Pedro Pescal. Tony Randall as Chris Evans. Okay, that last swap doesn't really work, but you get the idea.
Except Song doesn't really seem that interested in generating laughs. Her script is consistently smart, but, rather than trading in quips, it relies on sharp, often cynical, observations on this society's commodification of human relations. 'He makes you feel
valuable
,' says Lucy at one point. The client can do what she wants with that last word. The audience will suspect, deep down, the matchmaker means it more literally than she pretends. Harry is a 'luxury good'. Marriage is a 'business deal'.
Matchmakers exist in all societies – Barry Fitzgerald played one in Hollywood's most famous romanticisation of Ireland – but the current version speaks to the very American notion that, with the right personnel and the right equipment, a dedicated professional can achieve anything. Get a man to the moon. Land on the beaches of Normandy. Find a white man who makes over 250K a year for a thirtysomething psychoanalyst from Brooklyn Heights. A shocking late plot development – one that has irritated some US critics – presses home how uneasy Song (who once worked as a matchmaker) is with this way of thinking.
It is not just that the film dodges gags for socio-economic philosophising. For all the surface beauty here – Shabier Kirchner cinematography is to die for – the film is cooler and stiller than the regulation romcom. As in Past Lives, Song surrounds her New Yorkers with an attention-focusing mantle of silence. Gaps in the dialogue offer us opportunities to take the characters more seriously than we otherwise might.
So maybe Materialists is not quite a comedy. It is, however, hopelessly, delightfully Romantic (my capitalisation). We are, surely, not giving much away by admitting that the film – as anything in this genre must – ultimately sides with emotion over financial objectification. It does so without compromising the integrity of its rigorously drawn characters or inviting its fine leads to soften their disciplined performances.
Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic. Just don't go expecting There's Something About Mary.
Opens on Friday, August 15th, with previews in selected cinemas
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