'Materialists' Is The Anti-'Past Lives'
Celine Song's sophomore feature film deviates from the message in her first, with less satisfying results.
*Spoilers for the plot of Materialists and Past Lives.*
There’s a scene towards the beginning of Celine Song’s sophomore feature love triangle film Materialists that echoes her debut feature love triangle film Past Lives. Song’s lens tracks alongside the female main character as she walks away from her present good-on-paper man into the arms of her less successful past lover. But in Song’s superior opus Past Lives, the main character Nora Moon (an incredible Greta Lee) turns away from her Korean childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (a delicious Teo Yoo) and walks back into her present and future with her white husband, sobbing into his open arms.
It’s a devastating, bittersweet and realistic end to a beautiful autobiographical (yet embellished) story about how Celine Song is God’s favorite, is a super talented writer and director, and has been loved really well her whole life. Song’s stand-in, Nora, really can’t go wrong with the choices she has; her marriage to her white husband who loves her dearly has granted her the green card she needs to stay in America and compete for the Nobel (or Pulitzer or Tony) award she’s been coveting since childhood and happily left Hae Sung behind in Korea to pursue.
But if Nora had left her husband and life in New York, she could’ve returned to Korea with Hae Sung, found new, decolonized markers of success, and been loved very well by a very tall, very hot man. Inevitably someone would’ve gotten hurt, but like her mother says at the beginning of the film, “When you leave something behind, you gain something too.”
Lucy (Dakota Johnson), the main character in Materialists, doesn’t fair as well as Nora. A skilled matchmaker in Manhattan making a paltry $80,000/yr., Lucy is more mathematician than romantic, pairing up her clients based on the compatibility of their social and financial value, with hopes that romantic love develops as a bonus. We’re living in a material world, after all.
Like Nora, Lucy is practical and calculating. After growing up with parents who constantly fought over money before divorcing and continuing the pattern in her own life by dating a struggling actor for five years, Lucy has decided that, moving forward, she will only date and marry rich. Enter Pedro Pascal’s Harry, a billionaire private equity guy who sees Lucy’s “intangible” qualities and makes her feel valued and valuable. It doesn’t hurt that he can pay off her student debt with the change in the couch cushions of his $12 million Manhattan penthouse.
He’s handsome, he’s committed, he’s a perfectly tolerable man—a “unicorn” even, in matchmaker lingo—end scene, roll the damn credits!
But, alas. Lucy is a masochist who really misses arguing over money with her still-struggling actor ex, John (Chris Evans). She reconnects with him when he winds up being the cater-waiter at her clients’ wedding and they eventually find their way back to each other. Since learning that Song was also a matchmaker in New York for awhile, I’ll admit, my first reaction to the ending of Materialists was, Damn. Celine said she’s gon’ choose a white man in every lifetime.
My second thought, as someone who’s been on both sides of relationships that end due to incompatible financial situations, was that this gritty exploration of the way capitalism inherently destroys how we relate to each other could’ve been amazing!
Unfortunately, this otherwise painfully realistic examination of love under capitalism falls into outrageous fantasy by the third act.
As expected from her brilliant first foray, Song’s direction in Materialists is flawless. Her dialogue is lived in and her scenes are memorable. Sure, every main character is miscast—Dakota Johnson’s Lucy is too flat in scenes where she should be either emotionally dynamic or vulnerable; Chris Evans’ John does not look 37; and Pedro Pascal is too sexy for Lucy to be playing in Harry’s face like this. Johnson has zero chemistry with either of her two leading men and all three of them seem to be acting in a different movie than the others. But the biggest weakness of Materialists is that it feels like a series of disjointed scenes in search of a movie.
A break-up in the middle of the street over money in front of the Times Square Applebee’s; a bride confessing to her matchmaker that she only wants to be married to make her sister jealous; an immediate break-up in the kitchen after a billionaire confesses he was 5’6 before he had leg-lengthening surgery.
All of these are interesting and comical scenes in the abstract. But particularly that last scene, where Lucy gently dumps Harry, pushes the bounds of my suspended disbelief.
The first issue is the passage of time. How long has Lucy been dating Harry before she, like Carrie Bradshaw with Aidan in Sex and the City, gets the ick when she finds an engagement ring in his luggage? Harry’s supposed to take Lucy on her dream vacation to Iceland (apt for this cold and calculating woman) before she preemptively shuts him down. It seems like it’s been less than a year; why is she expecting herself to be in love with him already, to the point that she’d shut him down prematurely because she isn’t? He’d only bought a ring; it’s not like he’d proposed yet. Have a conversation! Give it some time, girl! It’s like nobody wants to grow into love anymore—or negotiate a $12 million penthouse in the divorce settlement!
The second incredulous thing in this break-up is that Lucy insists she’s not breaking up with Harry over the surgery revelation even though she does it immediately after Harry confesses the secret behind his 6’ height. When Lucy later stands on her tippy-toes to kiss her naturally tall-yet-broke new fiancé John at the end of the movie, it’s even harder to believe her.
And third and most significant is her overnight evolution from practical, calculating woman to someone who couldn’t care less about the math of love anymore. We’re supposed to believe that the sexual assault of one of Lucy’s female clients by her deviant male client—a jarring occurrence in what was widely marketed as a romantic comedy, and a cynical one as a plot device—is what leads Lucy to reject materialism in favor of a rematch in struggle love?
For an event as significant and unfortunately common as sexual assault, it feels a bit flippant to use it as a plot device to get our heroine to voluntarily return to the toxic familiarity of arguing with a man over money in the street. Did she learn nothing from her parents? Or even her past self?
What’s even more insulting about this sexual assault plot device is that, historically, the threat and burden of sexual assault usually leaves women victims struggling not just emotionally and physically but financially in the aftermath. If anything, this subplot should’ve driven Lucy to triple down on her desire to procure financial stability with the lovely man who makes her feel valuable.
But not only does Lucy reject Harry’s financial stability, she rejects her own as well. As she settles down to accept John’s engagement ring made out of a Trader Joe’s daisy bouquet, she’s telling her boss she wants to quit her job and shows no interest in the raise and promotion her boss is offering her to stay. Huh? John has already told her that his raggedy apartment and disgusting roommates are not suitable for her, and, though he promised he was going to move out and work more shifts and become financially stable, girl! He’s 37! If he was going to do that, he would’ve done it by now!
So, what is this reformed materialist’s plan, exactly? And how did we get here? Did Lucy secretly rob Harry in a deleted scene before the break-up so she no longer has money woes? Has capitalism been successfully overthrown by the inevitable socialist revolution in this timeline? Are U.S. muhfuckn dollars no longer necessary to meet our basic survival needs? The math is not mathing. For a film that otherwise insists on showing us the ugliest sides of the search for love, why can’t we see Lucy’s calculations for how she and John will make this failed relationship work this time around?
And why does she want to?
Even when John can suss out that something is troubling Lucy and Harry is otherwise oblivious to her distress (which is more an issue with Johnson’s non-verbal acting than it is a sign of poor Harry’s inattentiveness), John is still bad at making Lucy feel better. Without going into details about the assault on her client, Lucy confesses to John that she’s starting to believe she’s bad at her job and should leave the profession altogether. John “comforts” her with such condescension about her silly little girl job that she storms off.
They don’t speak again until things get worse at work. Lucy’s first instinct is to talk to John about it. He did such a bang-up job last time, so why not? In a more practical film, Lucy would’ve called Harry first, and he would’ve also sucked at taking her seriously and she could’ve left them both behind. Inspired by John, Lucy could’ve chosen to quit a job that makes her calculate the value of human life and chosen to redesign her life to accommodate the cost of doing something she’s really passionate about, instead—on her own. That would’ve been a satisfying end to materialism.
But in a world where women who are married to men are still more valuable in society than their single women counterparts, Lucy’s choice to marry John doesn’t seem as anti-materialist as the film would like us to believe. Statistically, relationships where women make more than their male partners are hell on earth for the women. But when Lucy’s clients are paying $10,000 to find “love,” perhaps partnering with the guy who loves her for free makes Lucy feel more valuable than her single counterparts. Even if it’s a marriage with a handsome hobo, to quote a line from the best rom-com ever, When Harry Met Sally: “At least you could say you were married.”
Even that cynical acknowledgment of Lucy’s abrupt about-face would’ve seemed more in line with the Lucy we’ve come to expect throughout the film, making new calculations from a space of admitted desperation. Instead, at the end of Materialists, she’s happily settled for exactly what she told John she never wanted: eating food out of a truck on a park bench for their anniversary. Why? One can only conclude that the trauma of someone else’s dating life has so badly worn Lucy down that she’s given up all hope that she might get to eat inside the Applebee’s one day. She even calls herself a “bad person” for not wanting to financially struggle, and it all feels like a psy-op.
If Lucy has to become a completely different person than who she’s been throughout the film in order to sustain this relationship with John—not caring about finances while living in the financial capital of the world—is Lucy really getting the happily ever after that this film suggests? If John winds up with Lucy, and still feels completely inadequate for her and compelled to promise her that he’s going to get his life together this time, is he really getting a happily ever after?
The final scene of Lucy and John in love mirrors the opening scene of a Neolithic couple predating capitalism and therefore able to freely and wordlessly connect based on who they are instead of how much they have to offer. Though Lucy and John have done nothing to earn this post-capitalist bliss, in an ideal, anti-capitalist world, they still deserve to see and love each other that freely. Once again, a nice concept, a nice scene. But within the context of the film that’s been telling us a different story for two acts, not only does this ending feel like a cop-out, it also feels a bit insulting. If it’s meant to be an escapist fantasy, where love overcomes typically insurmountable struggle, then leave out the sexual assault as a plot device. Otherwise, calculate until the bitter end the toll of race, class and gender oppression on love under capitalism, and show your work.
With a stronger inciting incident, a deeper character arc and a better actress in the lead role (God, what Greta Lee would’ve done with Lucy!) Materialists could’ve been a masterful dismantling of capitalistic valuations of humanity and maybe even a guide for how we can begin to relate to each other outside of these systems.
As it stands, Materialists isn’t a romance at all, but a cautionary tale of what happens when you’re trapped in a generational cycle of trauma from which you are unwilling to do the work to heal.
A less cynical view of Materialists might see it as the anti-Past Lives, a fantasy within a fantasy, where Nora as Lucy takes the road less traveled and explores what a happy life might’ve looked like if she had chosen Hae Sung, the one whom western capitalist ambition pushed away. The Hae Sung of Past Lives who decides to go to China to learn Mandarin instead of New York to declare his love for Nora (men are so dumb!) gets another chance as John in Materialists, and this time, he doesn’t waste it. He declares his undying love and devotion in such a way that Nora/Lucy feels safe enough to put down her practicality and embrace it. Perhaps the lesson of both films is that a woman’s practicality often develops out of necessity when romance fails her.
If Past Lives concludes with the reality that, under capitalism, love just isn’t enough, Materialists posits that it might be worth a try anyway, though the results are significantly less satisfying in practice.
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