materialists
July 22 – 24:
7 pm Nightly
Wed July 23:
3:30 afternoon showing
Rated PG – 1hr 47min
Comedy / Romance
*don’t forget we have AIR CONDITIONING & new seats!
To marry for love, or for money? That’s the age-old question writer-director Celine Song poses in her soulful romantic dramedy Materialists. It might sound like an archaic and frankly sexist notion at a time when the culture tells women we can have it all, and we can have it right now. The film is a mature deconstruction of the conventional rom-com, providing its trio of swoon-worthy stars some of their meatiest material yet while reaffirming Celine Song as a modern master of relationship dramas.
So much of Materialists is not what you might expect from a romcom. Like her feature film debut, the exquisite 2023 drama Past Lives, it’s a grown-up and thoughtful look at how adults actually feel and interact in the real world — and like that last film, features three people with possibly conflicting desires. Cannily, Song centres the action around someone whose entire professional life is in love: Lucy (Dakota Johnson, brilliantly poised and powerful) is an expert at dating maths, responsible for nine marriages, and a friend, confidante and effective therapist to her clients. But her personal life does not match up to these standards — until hunky rich person Harry (Pedro Pascal) and equally hunky poor person John (Chris Evans), her ex, (re)enter her life.
This is a film with the costume of a romcom but a brain and heart to challenge easy tropes. Dating, we are told here, is a question of value, a symbol of status and worth. But what happens when people are simply commodified into merchandise? And why would anyone engage in modern dating if it’s actually highly unpleasant, driven by obsessions with height, and rife with “known risks” for women, as one character coldly puts it?
Materialists wraps up with a beautiful bookend–as Seth Rogen’s character says on The Studio, who doesn’t love a bookend?–that’s so clever in its framing, details and color palette that it may make you want to go back to the beginning and watch it all over again. It remains clear-eyed, even as it makes the happily-ever-after seem possible after all.