@Courtesy of A24

After the surprising (but totally deserved) success of Past Lives, Celine Song returns with another movie that confirms how she is capable of talking about our present days and their contradictions, even if she decided to go in a (almost) completely different direction. If her first feature film (Academy Award nominations for best picture of the year and best original screenplay) she focused on characters that had to deal with how difficult it can be moving in a foreign country and leaving your life behind, while this new Materialists is a realistic portrait of a world where love is not enough, not anymore.

In order to even just survive in a competitive environment like New York City, one needs to be extremely careful and program his/her sentimental life – especially those relationships which could lead to marriage – thinking about a series of factors way more important than what we call love. Or at least this is how Lucy (Dakota Johnson) thinks and lives: she works as a matchmaker for a prestigious society, treating with absolute respect and human empathy her clients, trying to find them the man they would want to spend the rest of their life with. Before accepting the courtship of the rich and charming “unicorn” Henry (Pedro Pascal), she analyzes all the possible reasons this relationship could or could not work. Everything in the end seems to be perfect, unlike the previous relationship Lucy had with John (Chris Evans), a wanna-be actor that at almost forty years of age is still basically broke and shares a dirty apartment with two other roommates. 

Scene after scene, Materialists is carried by a screenplay that carefully develops the dry, focused commitment of the main character, creating an atmosphere and most important a character that is so brutally realistic about her life (and living in New York) that is almost cynical. And still, what the viewers hear from Lucy’s mouth is not a bitter vision of the world, but actually how things really work nowadays.

@Courtesy of A24

This means that Celine Song had very clearly in her mind what he wanted to talk about with her second movie and knew exactly how to do it. The Materialists is so true when it’s about depicting the issues of modern relationships that it becomes strangely less effective when romanticism enters in this love triangle. Another big point in favor of Celine Song as a director is the remarkable choices in the casting: Dakota Johnson is highly effective in Lucy’s role, her acting style is detached, distant, straight to the point.

This is so far the best performance of her career, a classic example of when the character fits perfectly the actor’s skills. Same thing for Pedro Pascal, whose natural elegance and tenderness elevate Henry’s role. Even Chris Evans, who clearly has a more limited range of skills compared to the other two protagonists, isn’t that bad portraying John. 

If you loved Past Lives, better to warn you that The Materialist is quite the opposite: where the movie with Greta Lee and John Magaro developed a tone and some atmospheres that were able to explain the inner life and struggles of the characters, in Materialists everything is on the plate, spelled out, analyzed down to the minutia.

This doesn’t perhaps make the movie too easy to enjoy, but it definitely shows the skills of Celine Song, particularly as a screenwriter. The link between Past Lives and Materialists is in fact the accuracy of the microcosm in which her characters live, struggle, and confront each other about topics and issues that are absolutely important in our contemporary world. Whether we like it or not, Celine Song is showing us who we are and which is the time we live in…

@Courtesy of A24

Rate: B-

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Here’s the trailer for Materialists: