MATERIALISTS is a movie I missed in theaters, caught on blu-ray a while back, and this week it will start streaming on Home Box Office Maximum, if you want to catch it to. I really needed to see it because it’s the second movie from writer/director Celine Song. Her first was PAST LIVES (2023), which I didn’t review, but I loved it. It’s about an American woman (Greta Lee) reuniting with a guy (Teo Yoo) who she knew before her family left South Korea when she was little. He’s handsome and in love with her and reminds her of her roots, but also she loves her life and her boyfriend and oh man. It’s so good. Swooningly romantic, achingly beautiful, keenly observant, feels so true to people and to life, never like a formula. Why didn’t I write about it? Maybe I was afraid I couldn’t do it justice. I should watch it again.

Celine Song Joint #2 is pretty different. Another classy A24 production, but with beautiful movie stars* and a little bit of a satirical or social commentary aspect to it, in that it depicts a world of entitled people with superficial and unattainable demands for relationships. Madame Web herself Dakota Johnson (NEED FOR SPEED) stars as Lucy Mason, a top matchmaker for a New York City company called Adore. She has a great reputation for success, so her clients feel comfortable bluntly talking about people as lists of statistics: salary, net worth, race, age, weight, height. Most of it is very demeaning and presumptuous.

Everyone wants to marry rich, and Adore throws Lucy a party every time she hooks up a big wedding. At one of those (notch #9 on her belt) she tries to match the groom’s brother, Harry Castillo (Maxwell Lord himself, Pedro Pascal, THE GREAT WALL) with another client, but instead he begins pursuing her.

At the same wedding she sees her ex-boyfriend John Pitts (Johnny Storm himself, Chris Evans, RED ONE) for the first time in a while. He comes up behind her and pours the drink he knows she wants… because he’s with the catering crew. In flashbacks we see all about their time together, when they were both doing gigs like that and struggling to make it as actors. They went through it together. John is a sweetheart, and an artist, he’s down to earth, a working man, he looks like Chris Evans – in fact, somehow I swear they made him look even more handsome than standard Chris Evans. Why the fuck did she not stay with him? Because he’s poor.

That sounds shitty. That is shitty. I don’t like it. But when we see the painfully true to life fights they used to have we can understand her more. She was tired of junker cars and terrible day jobs and shitty apartments shared with the worst roommates and not having the clothes she wanted and the food she wanted and not expecting those things to ever change if she stayed on that trajectory. That’s just how it was and at least she was honest with herself and with him that it was more important to her to escape that existence than to continue acting. Some people have to do that. These two had such a spark, but their lifestyle needs made them incompatible. It happens.

And yet here is this guy Harry who’s very nice and just as handsome as John and has more money than Lucy could ever need, openly offering to make her life easy. A “unicorn” in her jargon, because he has everything everyone asks for. She gives him a chance, runs her hands along the surfaces of his $12 million Tribeca apartment, has a good time. Does he seem to excite her as much as John does? No, I don’t think so.

I think in the standard version of this story Harry would seem like a dream come true at first, and John would be the underdog who has to prove why he’s better, and maybe (if it was WEDDING CRASHERS or THE WEDDING SINGER) Harry would turn out to actually be a piece of shit, and she’d have to see his true face and feel betrayed. In this version both suitors are good people trying to win her over honestly, but she’s skeptical of them the whole time. I think she sees the pros and cons of both situations and just assumes neither can work.

Tonally it’s a little odd. Since it’s set in this world of matchmakers and rich people, it could be practically a documentary or absolute fiction, I would have no idea. Never met anybody like that. Apparently Song really worked as a matchmaker in New York City for a bit, so maybe the details are more accurate than I’d guess, but to me it feels less like the real world than PAST LIVES does. There’s a sort of twist in the Harry story – a punchline, really – that’s absurd and very funny and, you then realize, perfectly set up like a joke. But there’s also a harrowing subplot about a client (Zoe Winters) being assaulted by someone Lucy set her up with (John Magaro, MY SOUL TO TAKE). We see both the worst and best sides of Lucy when she’s trying to deal with that situation. But it’s all very tense and serious and I definitely don’t consider the movie to be a comedy (Wikipedia labels it a “romantic comedy-drama film”).

Maybe that’s all they were talking about, that it’s not a rom-com, but I remember after it played theaters some of its admirers said it had been mis-marketed. I had never seen a trailer, but they claimed those had set people up for a different movie, a romantic one. And they felt it was quite the opposite. A cynical, acerbic, sort of anti-romance, I believe they were saying.

After seeing it, though, I thought that description was completely off base. This is a straight up romance, it’s just a very good one that’s shot on film like a Real Movie and allows itself to have nuance or to deviate from the formula much more than it would if it was made for cable. So I’m guessing those people just didn’t want to admit to themselves that they liked a romance, or are so disdainful of the form that they don’t even recognize it when they see it. The alleged cynicism would have to refer to Lucy, with all her disillusionment about relationships of substance, and her performative shallowness when it comes to income. But come on, man. You’ve seen movies before. These are relatable bad attitudes that she (spoiler if you’ve never seen a movie) will grow beyond when she learns how to believe in love. Of course! Did you turn it off early or something?

I think this is a good romance in the standard formulaic way because I found myself embarrassingly invested in these characters’ affections for each other and wanting them to make it work. But I think it’s also a good romance in a deeper way because of a more unusual scene that I just found so beautiful in so many ways that I had to bravely, courageously, heroically struggle to keep the tears in. Not to brag. It’s a major moment in Lucy and John’s relationship, so it’s probly a spoiler, but here’s what it is. While on a country road (taking a drive as friends) they see a procession of vans from the catering company John works for heading to a wedding, and they decide to follow and crash the wedding. (It’s not like WEDDING CRASHERS where they lie and become the center of attention, but it did seem suspicious that nobody seemed to notice they were strangers.)

It’s a nice wedding on a farm, and as the sun goes down I remembered that oh yeah, Song and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner really know how to gently caress somebody with light. Jesus, it looks so good. Lucy and John are enjoying hanging out like old times, in this romantic location, so Lucy can’t help but let loose with a monologue about all the reasons love can never work, describing a hypothetical failed marriage that’s probly her parents’, unleashing every worry she has from her job of commodifying romantic partners. Shortly after that they calm down and hit the dance floor in the barn, and have a nice time in each others’ arms. We see all the couples around them, with a notable diversity of genders, ethnicities, and body types, an eye for less obvious pairings than our central beautiful movie stars. I wondered if these might be real couples, because they’re all looking into each others’ eyes with such adoration. Every shot is saying “of course love is real, stupid,” and the thing is I didn’t even need Lucy to notice this rebuttal to her speech, or for her to change her mind, or give John another chance. I was satisfied just with the beauty of these two people with this complicated history, no matter what may happen to them later, allowing themselves to experience this moment together. Maybe that’s all they’ll ever get, just a moment, like the two in the other movie. Maybe it’s still worth doing.

Man, is this what those books with Fabio painted on the covers were like? Am I that kind of softy now? Is this elevated Harlequin? I don’t know. But it ends with (spoiler) a long uninterrupted shot of the city clerk’s office crowded with joyful (real?) couples who are not materialists (or can’t afford to be) but have decided to try out this institution of marriage together. I’ve been there and I’ve had some friends getting there lately and I personally don’t think everybody should do it but I love when it makes people happy. I just want people to be happy. Most of us deserve it.

I have no idea where Song will go from here. Although she’s been announced as the writer of a sequel to MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING, I doubt she will strictly be a romance re-inventor. Whatever she does, I’ll be on the lookout. I want to mention two things I read about her:

1) She was born Ha-Young but renamed herself when she moved to Ontario. Some of her family remembers her getting the name from Jacques Rivette’s CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, but she says it was from a Celine Dion CD.

2) Before she was a filmmaker, she was a playwright. When the pandemic cut short the off-Broadway run of her play Endlings she moved on to a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull performed live on Twitch using The Sims 4.

I think both of those stories fit well with how I see her work – artful, serious and heartfelt, but ignoring expectations, definitions, categories, lines between high and low. Her films are beautifully crafted, they look like Art With a Capital A, one of them explores very trenchant themes of cultural identity, but also they are swoony and lovey dovey and that actually kinda ends up feeling like the main point of them, but who gives a shit, that’s part of life too. I think she’s great.

(Oh wow, and her husband wrote CHALLENGERS? Lots of talent and taste in that family.)

If you only see one Celine Song joint, definitely go for PAST LIVES. But MATERIALISTS is her second best so far. I liked it.

*I don’t mean that they’re more beautiful. For me personally, the characters in PAST LIVES seeming a little more like actual people I might meet makes them way hotter, but MATERIALISTS is a different type of movie with a different type of glamour, and that’s okay. That’s allowed.