REVIEW: ‘Materialists’ Proves Celine Song Understands Love Better Than Most Of Us

Written and directed by Celine Song in her follow-up to her Best Picture-nominated debut, Past Lives, Materialists asks some devastating eternal questions: can people change, do they need to, and can we love them anyway? Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker in New York City working with rich, vapid clients who have unrealistic and unsavory expectations. While at the wedding of one of her clients, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the hot, rich, kind brother of the groom, and also runs into John (Chris Evans), her poor, disheveled ex-boyfriend.

Working with the upper crust of New York, wealth starts to wear on a person. When Materialists begins, Lucy is portrayed as the queen of convincing wealthy women that they can find love through her services; they just need to take the risk of dating first. She’s transactional about it, describing and treating dating like a financial exchange. The line between what she actually believes about dating, love, and marriage is blurry because Lucy doesn’t quite know the truth herself. But she lays it on thick to her clients and potential future clients nonetheless.

The dialogue is grotesquely thick. The early dialogue is uncomfortably insipid and moves at a bizarre cadence. It’s either implying that the characters are so meticulously studied on how to speak that their conversations are mechanical rather than emotional, or that they’re bluffing so hard about knowing what to say that they can’t actually have a real conversation.

But slowly, the layers of insincerity and self-preservation peel away, and Materialists reveals itself as a masterful exploration of connections between disparate people and whether we can help who we are and what we want from life. The movie proves, once again, that director and writer Celine Song understands the nature of love better than most of us.

The tools for Materialists’ genius are its camera placement and editing.

The tools for Materialists‘ genius are its camera placement and editing. The movie is dialogue-heavy, and it features two types of setups. There are those where Lucy and either Harry or John are in the same shot together, and there are those where the camera is placed over one character’s shoulder, pointing at the other but leaving the back of the first’s head clearly in the shot. The movie switches back and forth between these two setups with enormous intention.

Lucy and Harry first interact briefly in the same shot because there’s initial attraction, but their first real conversation goes back and forth over their shoulders because they’re testing each other out. There’s no trust yet, and their string of questions is testing the waters. The camera goes back and forth, mid-sentence sometimes, between who it’s pointed at.

It doesn’t matter who is speaking. The focus is always sharply on one person at a time, but the back of the other character’s head is always in the frame as a reminder that, despite a disconnect between the two characters, they’re still listening intently to one another.

Once Lucy and Harry start dating, the shots mostly shift to wider shots where both characters are on-screen and facing each other. Even when they have an over-the-top conversation about relationships using business metaphors, they’re now on screen together because they’re on the same page. However, the focus in this gorgeous shot isn’t on them alone. You can’t help but wander your eyes around the whole space and zone out of what they’re discussing. The business of their shared screen portends the truth about their relationship.

Dating and love are both so risky and so simple.

Meanwhile, Lucy and John are experiencing their own emotional and camera arc. When they first re-encounter one another at the wedding, Lucy and John share the screen because they’re romanticizing the parts of their former relationship they miss the most. However, when they do share the screen in wide shots, unlike Lucy and Harry, Lucy and John remain the primary focus. Everything around them is just pretty adornment rather than a distraction.

A flashback goes a long way in showing that Lucy wasn’t always the carefully worded person she’s made herself become. But when she locks in to have real conversations with John, the camera also swings over their shoulders as they remember the distrust, maybe even hatred, that has festered between them.

Sometimes, the camera switches styles mid-conversation, just as a few words can set off a chain reaction of contradictory emotions. The sudden flash cuts between angles and focuses elevate the emotional stakes every time because they help indicate a subtle shift in the characters’ views of one another.

Celine Song is a master of explaining love.

Materialists talks a lot about the difference between dating and falling in love, at first delineating dating as something hard and risky and love as something simple and natural. On the surface, it’s a beautiful, true sentiment that anybody who has ever dated or fallen in love can relate to. But the longer Lucy goes on discussing this with Harry, John, and her clients, the more clear it becomes that sometimes, the inverse is just as much the reality.

The conclusions that all three characters come to about dating and love are hard-won. There’s a huge risk on both sides, but both dating and love are revealed to be much more straightforward than most of us consider them to be. Material expectations are undeniable, but they’re also a nuisance. There is no single, clear answer on how one finds the right person or whether dating is guaranteed to match you with the right people every time.

Celine Song is a genius when it comes to breaking down the complicated nature of love and using screen presence to illustrate it. Materialists is as risky and simple as love itself. Its coarse dialogue and stilted acting may be off-putting at first, but it’s all designed with great intention that pays off in spades.

Materialists is in theaters everywhere June 13th.