New York City matchmaker Lucy, tries to balance her life between an imperfect job and her own imperfect pending personal relationships.
Written and directed by Celine Song, who gave us the Oscar nominated, thought provoking and beautifully balanced Past Lives comes a dive into the turbulent world of a fast paced unbalanced New York City. Set in the trendy Tribeca neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan we are delivered on the surface a polished display of the glossy ‘hub’ of financial America. Starring a trio of A-listers, we have our refined lead in the form of Dakota Johnson as Lucy, the apparently perfect middle earning matchmaker, Chris Evans as John, our struggling ‘cater-waiter’ artist trying to make ends meet in a messy flatshare, and lastly Pedro Pascal as Harry, our high flying debonaire multi millionaire.
Materialists, on the surface, is a tight script that concentrates – you guessed it – on how we loosely conduct our lives based on our financial abilities. Written and directed by Celine who herself was a struggling artist and writer finding six months of financial stability as she set about her writing objectives. Bizarrely, as he found herself becoming great at her matchmaking role in real life she broke free, preventing her future from becoming a non writer. If set in London, it would be written around our three major separate classes. Indeed a foreign idea in the USA, we instead receive this clarification through what we gather about our three characters’ differing incomes. So far so good. The glossy opening to this tight 2 hour runtime gives us the hope and possibly of the style of the wonderful Devil Wears Prada with the tall skylines over Lucy’s perfectly styled wardrobe as she glides to the office. Hope and reality however are two separate beasts.
There are many positives of this movie that are well executed. The beautiful backdrop of Manhattan, the classy tall offices of Lucy’s matchmaking workplace and the high class restaurants. The problems begin to arise however with the chemistry between our three characters. Individually, Dakota, Pedro and Chris are on the whole at the top of their game, although some are further up than others with recent and past offerings of differing levels. The problem here though is when they are placed together in their effort to bring this script alive from an Oscar nominated director.
As the centre of this love triangle, Dakota seems to come across as distant and cold although some may say her approach as cool and calm. As the veritable lynch pin in this group Dakota flattens any approach that in other actors hands may have worked better. Chris and Pedro, who are by no means perfect, magnify the lows rather than the highs we have seen before in Celine’s Past Lives. This can be witnessed in any number of scenes rather than be the unfortunate exception. Her previous film which was based on a gorgeously romantic interaction between two actors Great Lee (The Morning Show) and the slightly lesser known Teo Yoo, Past Lives gave us an insight into what could have been an actual romance in real life.
In a cinematic world of superhero films and blood thirsty offerings, Materialists for me was a welcome break from death, destruction and the hero’s journey. Unfortunately where Past Lives worked so well, Materialists did not. Unintentionally written by Celine as a romantic comedy, there are moments of well written joy that do indeed work well yet the sum of the parts does not ultimately create a great picture. Seek Celine’s Past offering to see how a romantic film could and actually has been done before.
Author: Piers, Maidstone Store
