Nate At The Movies

After enjoying Celine Song’s debut feature in 2023, I was obviously excited to see her return with a love story told by three of the most attractive and admired actors in the business right now, in my cinematic opinion. Materialists promised to be dramatic and quick and passionate in its trailers, but the level of depth that Song pulled out of this story and cast was impressive, though not surprising.

The love triangle between Lucy, John, and Harry was endlessly entertaining and emotionally rich, continuously pointing back to her accessible and impactful themes about what people value in their relationships, and the difference in how love and a “good match” feels. I also enjoyed how the story subverted the expectation that there would be a fit that didn’t work from an outside perspective; there was no “bad boyfriend” or poor relationship for Lucy. Rather, the enemy was Lucy’s own perceptions of romance. Her valuing of material possessions—“checking boxes”, so to speak—had to be overcome for her to find true love, and I don’t think that idea has been explored in other romance films very often.

Clearly, I enjoyed the story of this movie and how Song conveyed her themes, but the cast is what got my butt in a seat, and they delivered. We’re all aware that it’s Pedro Pascal Summer, and he was a standout—his facial expressions are absolutely killer—but I was shocked by how much I enjoyed Dakota Johnson and, to a lesser extent, Chris Evans. Evans isn’t one of the intolerable ones in the MCU, but I always like seeing him outside the MCU, like in Knives Out. I’ve seen so little of Dakota Johnson’s filmography, but I am aware of the trainwreck that was Madame Web, so I liked seeing her rebound as strongly as she did here. As far as rom-coms go, I couldn’t have asked for a better bunch of principal performances.

Materialists is going to go down as one of the better rom-coms (less of the com here, but that’s ok) that I’ve seen recently, and while it didn’t have quite the emotional gravitas on first watch as something like About Time or La La Land, I was surprised by how locked in I was tonight, and how much I enjoyed this. I need another Celine Song romance, stat.