Is heterosexual romance doomed, is the romantic comedy? Those questions swirl with light, teasing provocation in Celine Song’s “Materialists,” a seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple. Set in the New York of today, it stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker who’s all business until her personal life takes a surprising turn — if more to her than to you — when she’s swept into a romance with two different men. One is a broke dreamboat (Chris Evans as John), the other is more of a superyacht (Pedro Pascal as Harry).
Theirs is a sexy, sleek triangle, one that starts taking flight during a wedding after-party where Harry and Lucy have been chatting at the singles’ table. A matchmaker, she introduced the bride and the groom, and now is eyeing up Harry as a prospective client, a so-called unicorn (wealthy, full head of hair, tall). Harry, who’s the groom’s brother, is more interested in her. With sly smiles, they playfully wink and coo, lunge and parry. Just as their flirting begins heating up, John — a waiter and, ta-da, her ex — loudly plunks down bottles of Lucy’s favorite drink order: a Coke and a beer. The lines of attack have been established, and it’s on.
Romantic comedies are often described as battles of the sexes, a metaphor that suggests that love affairs are effectively wars. Feelings get badly bruised in “Materialists,” and there’s a sobering shock of violence that’s unusual in screen comedies or romances. But for Lucy and her clients, dating isn’t about winners and losers; it’s transactional, a market for buyers and sellers, and a matter of exchange value. Lucy’s clients yearn, have familiar swoony hopes and dreams, but they’re also consumers with shopping lists that include a prospect’s height, weight, hair (or lack thereof) and age. “She’s 40 and fat,” one disgruntled male client tells Lucy early on about a match. “I would never swipe right on a woman like that.”
Blunt and effective, that line is as realistic as it is gasp-out-loud ugly. It also an example of how Song can distill an entire ethos into a single, bracingly unsentimental line. (This is her second feature; her first was the wistful “Past Lives.”) What makes the moment land, though, is how Song uses the contempt in the guy’s voice — it stops Lucy in her tracks — to signal that Song isn’t interested in making just another dopey romance. He sounds insulted, angry, and not just at Lucy or his date (Zoë Winters as Sophie). It makes you wonder what he thinks about women, which introduces a shiver of menace that lingers even after Song shifts tones and focus to settle on Lucy’s budding romance with Harry and her feelings for John.
That affair and those feelings are warm, true (or true enough) and, at times, delightful; there are, romance fans know, few movie pleasures as agreeable as watching good-looking, talented actors playact love. It’s especially nice to see Johnson in a lead role that makes the most of her gifts. A consistently surprising actress, she is a supremely, sometimes fascinatingly languorous screen presence, one suggestive of Malibu beaches and excellent weed. She’s been in the spotlight since childhood (her parents are Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) and seems invitingly comfortable in her own skin, without a trace of that detached quality that can encase some beautiful, famous people like a protective membrane. If anything, Johnson seems lightly amused to be the center of attraction, and entirely aware of why she is.
It’s instructive then that the first image of Lucy is a reflection of her face in a mirror. She’s doing her makeup and getting ready for work, and looks attentive yet unreadable. Lucy is soon on the move, her ponytail swinging, easing through New York with a purposefulness that dovetails with Song’s filmmaking. In crisp, breezy scenes, with lilting music and some great sound work, Song introduces the matchmaking company where Lucy is a star employee, her killer, off-kilter sales pitch — “you’re looking for a nursing-home partner and a grave buddy” — and the outwardly independent women who flock to her, women who are edging toward 40 (or older) and are as much in Song’s sightlines as Lucy and her romantic foils are.
The larger story begins the moment that Pascal’s Harry glides into the wedding reception with a smile and the practiced, discreetly oiled charm of a glad-handing politician. Pascal’s natural likability goes a long way to making Harry — who’s in private equity and, after Lucy asks him, says his bespoke bachelor pad cost $12 million — not just bearable but also a guy you root for. Harry’s smoothness works as a nice counterpart to John’s petulance. Best known for the time he put in at the Marvel factory as Captain America, Evans has the looks and bearing of a romantic ideal. Life, however, has roughed up John, and so has love; Evans plays his character with a grudging woundedness that can read as self-pity, a defensive posture, a mask, if you will, that this very mortal, imperfect man wears to obscure his aching yearning.
If Lucy’s yearning is less palpable it’s because the character — who can seem as transactional as her clients — and the story never finally add up. Song has come at the romantic comedy deftly, a touch analytically. She’s complicated the genre and brought it up to speed, folded in nods at dating apps and added some jaundiced (realistic!) takes on marriage. “I am a modern woman,” an anxious bride-to-be weepily tells Lucy. “It’s not like my family needs a cow.” But Song is better at laying out ideas about love, romance, marriage and what it means to live and to love in an age in which everything has been reduced to its market value than she is at piecing these parts into a persuasive whole. She also incorporates a subplot involving a sexual assault that’s more admirable on political grounds than narratively successful.
That kind of grim turn would have been unthinkable in the classic Hollywood romantic comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, the genre’s glory years. In those films, fast-talking men and women traded quips and devilish looks, and sometimes found their way back to each other after separation in a subset of romances that the philosopher Stanley Cavell termed “the comedy of remarriage.” For Cavell, these weren’t simple romps but parables about the equality of consciousness between men and women, about “a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other.” Since then, there have been intermittent signs of genre life, of course, but if romantic comedies remain frustratingly tough to pull off, especially those with a Hollywood-style gloss, it’s largely because that struggle continues.
That said, part of what’s appealing about “Materialists” is how Song navigates the genre’s and Lucy’s contradictions. Like her heroine, Song is caught between two forces, namely her obvious affection for old-school romantic comedy and her desire to speak honestly about what it means to be a real, thinking, desiring woman — a person! — in a world that undermines and undervalues women. One problem is that once you acknowledge that the real world exists, it can cast a shadow. In moments of “Materialists” that shadow is so heavy it’s hard to see how Song is going to work her way to any kind of happy ending. I love that she tries, and how she tries. She isn’t the only one who wants to have her (wedding) cake and critique it, too.
Materialists
Rated R for language and references to sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘Materialists’ Review: When Dakota Met Pedro (and Chris) appeared first on New York Times.
