What Is Love? 'Materialists' Don't Hurt Me
#324: "Materialists," "Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster," "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," "28 Weeks Later"
Edition 324:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Celine Song follows up Past Lives with another wistful love triangle story. I revisited a 2023 phenomenon, am covering my biggest pop culture blindspot, and knocked out both installments of the 28 Days franchise before the new one comes out this weekend. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” baby we were born to run.
Materialists
Past Lives was my No. 2 movie of 2023, and the kind of masterpiece that makes you sit up and take notice whenever that filmmaker makes anything again. That’s doubly true when Celine Song decided to take aim at the kind of big, glitzy rom-coms that have died a quiet death at the box office over the past 15 years.
Or, at least, that’s what it seems to be. The plot is a love triangle of love vs. money, one of those classic rom-com setups (quite literally the plot of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility) that practically writes itself. Dakota Johnson plays a New York City matchmaker who must choose between private equity sugar daddy Pedro Pascal and broke manchild actor Chris Evans.
In the crassest of terms, you’ve got a love triangle brewing between Captain America, Mr. Fantastic and … Madame Web (lol).
But Song, whose background is in playwriting, is trying to layer in a few different overstories into this crisp sub-two-hour runtime. Johnson’s matchmaker breaks dating down into what she calls “the math,” or the compatibility of each person’s key stats — income, height, family background, and so on. Is scoring high the same as winning the game, if the game here is marriage, and what’s the purpose of coupling with someone in the first place?
The movie works best as a conversation starter for these deeper topics — in my own experience over the past few years dating in Los Angeles, “the math” is pretty accurate — and for the types of people who place themselves inside the world of a movie and the shoes of its characters I think there is plenty to chew on.
Song’s style through two projects is proving to be quite writerly, not in the same style as an Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet but with the same kind of authorial command of language and intelligent exchange.
As someone who is quite receptive to that kind of storytelling, I’m a soft mark for this movie, though I can certainly identify with the critical backlash it’s received.
Song’s tone is definitely wistful and longing, which drains the movie of the kind of lighthearted fun that powers most successful entries in the rom-com genre. It’s no that the movie is dull, but that electric current that flows between romantic leads or even comedic side characters is mostly missing from the exchanges, which are more heady than flirtatious.
Johnson’s anti-chemistry with Pascal is kind of an intentional device of the movie (their sex scene takes place entirely off camera, and whenever they are kissing Johnson is only interested in looking past him to his lush penthouse apartment), but the love triangle loses any sense of balance when a viewer isn’t buying there’s any chance that she is going to pick him in the end.
While Johnson has unmistakable on-screen magnetism, her flat delivery and blank stare make her a prime candidate for my growing Schwarzenegger Phylum (other inductees include Gal Gadot and Jacob Elordi, with Ana de Armas’ application still under review). She gets overpowered, both within the narrative and in the acting, by Evans’ heart-on-his-sleeve emoting machine.
Part of me wonders whether any of the three actors are well suited for selling the eloquence and verbosity of Song’s dialogue. None particularly excel at her incredibly wordy monologues.
I think all of these problems could be solved by addressing a problem I pointed out a few months ago on Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. For whatever reason, we simply do not trust young people to lead movies anymore. Pascal is 50, Evans is 44, Johnson is 35.
I could maybe buy Johnson as an early-to-mid-30s NYC woman, even if the movie says she makes $80,000 per year and supposedly lives by herself in Manhattan (ha). I could maybe buy that Johnson is a mid-30s actor who works as a cater-waiter to afford his, again, Manhattan apartment with roommates. But in my opinion, telling a story about modern love in modern times would be only improved by aging those characters in their late 20s and casting from the new generation of great actors.
In that golden age of rom-coms, stars were created rather than exploited. And while I’m a realist who knows this movie probably doesn’t get made without established star power, the devil’s advocate in me wants to point out that Anyone But You made $220 million with a young unproven cast!
The scales of positives and negatives weigh fairly evenly, but for me tip slightly in the positive direction. I think anyone who goes to see this movie will find themselves thinking about it and talking about it and its themes for several days afterward, which is to its enormous credit.
And I remain pretty convinced that Song has several more awesome movies to make in her career. I know I’ll be lining up to see all of them.
Something New
Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster (Netflix): It was only two years ago that the world became obsessed with the missing titan submersible, a distinctly modern phenomenon powered by a ticking clock (22 hours of oxygen!) and meme trolling. But the true problem, as told by this documentary that spoke to almost all of the principal people who survived, is a problem that’s as old as time — one man’s ego led to a company culture that made catastrophic disaster a question of when and not if.
I was worried watching this documentary would be a lot of people saying “I told you so!” about problems they did not flag at the time, but as it turns out, there were about a billion concerning red flags pointed out by people who got railroaded by someone who had more power and money than them. Now THAT is a story that seems quite resonant at the moment.
Something Old
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Max): My biggest pop culture blind spot has forever been Harry Potter — never read the books or seen any movie other than this first one, until right now. Spurred on by my recent Forbes story on JK Rowling, one of my summer projects this year is to go through the whole series, and as of now, I’m halfway through book three. I decided to watch each movie after finishing each book as a little treat, so you may be getting my little capsule thoughts on each of them as I go through.
My hottest take through two books/movies: if you separate from Harry’s POV for a second, is the Dursley family (Harry’s aunt/uncle he grew up with) really that bad?? They love their son, he cares about his career, they’re trying to protect Harry from magic because they think it’s dangerous (wouldn’t you?) and led to his parents’ death, and many of the times they’ve gotten angry at Harry were entirely justifiable, like when he ruined the cake she spent hours making and in the process spoiled his big business deal. Our hatred of them seems heavily predicated on the fact that they’re overweight…what do you all think?!
Something To Stream
28 Weeks Later (Hulu): This weekend is the release of 28 Years Later, and as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m just now catching up to this long-gestating trilogy. Just like the first movie—which I failed to mention last time is credited with popularizing “fast” zombies, a BIG deal—this second installment is a masterclass in spectacle on a budget (a reported $15 million).
I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first, because even though it broadens out the scale of the story to six months after the initial infection and tells a story across London, it does so without carrying massive baggage that weighs so many franchises down (reminiscent of the A Quiet Place trio). Idris Elba, Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner headline a cast of survivors thrown into panic, giving viewers part action movie, part horror, and part family drama. This movie got me so much more pumped to see the third installment this weekend!
Trailer Watch: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Timmy Chalamet and Bob Dylan walked so that Jeremy Allen White and Bruce Springteen could run, it would seem. This biopic is about the making of the “Nebraska” album, for any Springsteen heads out there (of which I am not one), and if the movie performs as well as the hype I’ve been seeing online this week, don’t put it past Disney to formulate some kind of team-up movie of Boomer rocker Avengers in the future.
So glad we agree on The Materialists. I was preparing my argument in favor of it 😄