Materialists Review - Celine Song's sophomore effort is transcendent

Chase Gifford
Jun 11
5 min read

“Whenever I date a guy, I think, is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?” - Rita Rudner

From time to time, a new voice will enter the arena of cinematic storytelling and will debut with an immediate hit. Writer and director Celine Song is one of those fresh voices with her gorgeous freshmen release, A24’s Past Lives. So much of that film is about the silences between our words. It’s about what goes left unsaid, often being the loudest thing in the room. What we do say and what we leave in the quiet, fleeting moments and in the case of Past Lives you mix in culture differences and thoughts of what may have been both past, present and future are difficult things to ignore.

What if is one of the most impossible, unknowable, and powerfully maddening questions in our reality. It can destroy you if you let it. In the case of Past Lives, they stare at one another and imagine lifetimes together. They imagine eons of time that will never come to pass and how there is an inherent tragedy in that, even if your chosen path is a happy one. What is fate and what is happenstance? 인연 or in-yeon is Korean meaning providence or fate. It alludes to even the most miniscule of interactions between people, something as insignificant as brushing a stranger’s shoulder on a busy sidewalk indicates a past connection. So much said by saying nothing at all. Past Lives is unrequited love, all of what could have been rolled into the most profound silences in recent cinema.

Song’s sophomore follow-up, Materialists, addresses many of the same themes and questions but does so from an entirely different vantage point. It’s of another culture, of another continent entirely, residing in the modern era of dating in New York city. Past Lives explores love and all of its vastness. It can stretch across time and space effortlessly in ways that boggle the human mind. Materialists explores the depths of love and what its presence means in modern day connection.

In the beginning of the story, love is very fleeting if present at all. It’s a word to strive for while not really understanding what it means. The characters approach it with a callous and shallow opinion of love believing self-worth and being hopelessly fastidious are one and the same. Unwilling to date any man under six feet tall or an income of less than a half million a year, no fat women, no one under a certain tax bracket or over a certain age is all seen now as “knowing your worth.” In reality it’s delusion on a mass scale and in the case of Dakota Johnson’s character, Lucy, it’s a gold mine of people looking for their imagined “perfect date.” And she is more than happy to oblige. No request or demand is too blunt or shallow. She simply tells them they have nothing to worry about and she will find them the perfect match. And therein lies the overarching questions of Materialists: What does perfect match mean? How does one quantify what perfect is from one person to another?

Materialists is about people with a self-perceived knowledge of what it is they want in a romantic partner. Lucy works for a matchmaking service that facilitates dates for those that can afford it. Most demands and “non-negotiables” she faces are as unrealistic as hoping to walk on Mars in the near future. Lucy has come to the conclusion that love is a mathematical equation that is easily solvable by finding similarities between clients as shallow as demands of no men under six feet or no women past a certain age even when they are the very age they refuse to even consider. Every time they bark at her to find a mythical creature of a human being you can see the light in her eyes slightly dim. With no concept of anything she’s better at than matchmaking she stays adamant in this materialistic world of mass delusion.

In the process of finding one of her most difficult clients another potential suitor she meets Harry, the kind of man that in her business is known as a unicorn, the impossible catch. He is handsome, fit, wealthy, at least six feet tall, and is well-educated. All things that have their place certainly but notice none of these things has to do with true compatibility. Still, he is the ultimate catch but instead of finding him a proper counterpart, he pursues her ultimately convincing her she is worthy of his station. All her training says otherwise but maybe at her most cynical she can see that maybe she’s been wrong about this whole love thing. Now enter John, a broke but attractive waiter and flailing stage actor who comes from Lucy’s past, an incomplete story she thought was long over with. Little does she know that both John and Harry have something to teach her about the trials of love and what being perfect for someone truly means.

While this has a lot more dialogue than Past Lives, there are still the moments of silence that speak volumes between these adrift characters. It is a lesson of wealth not being the ultimate solution but knowing being broke isn’t always a death sentence. Sometimes the pursuit of success is what matters most. Knowing that Harry’s apartment cost him twelve million dollars doesn’t keep her doubts at bay or her worries from forming. By all reasoning, Harry is perfect for Lucy. He checks all the boxes as she likes to say. But then there’s John, seemingly also perfect for her on a completely different path than John. This leaves Lucy stuck in her own thoughts of doubt, in herself and in the things she “knew.”

In the beginning, the film looks at love as its characters do, with a distant kind of misunderstanding of love, a mistrust of it, and an inaccurate map of how to find it. As the characters develop, so too does the story. In the end it finds a happy but honest stance on love and what genuine perfection in another really is. As the characters mature, the story does as well. It features soft performances from the three leads without sacrificing strong, well written dialogue for this talented trio to really chew on. They all shine, especially Chris Evans who feels better here than he’s ever been.

Both of her films feel like windows into stories that have no misconceptions on the realities of life and love and what it means to be complete through the presence of another. But they also never dismiss the yearning for a greater influence that may alter their paths in a meaningful way. Celine Song maintains her mature but delicate approach that makes Materialists a perfect companion piece to Past Lives. Song proves that rom-coms don’t have to be vacant in depth or truth. They can be honest without losing any sense of wonder that her characters may possess.