Don't Like - The Perceived Emptiness Of Modern Romance
A short review of Celine Song's Materialists
Celine Song’s new movie Materialists is like the worst kind of date: so boring that it doesn’t even give you a fun story to tell. There has been some debate as to whether that’s an issue of the marketing portraying it as a rom com, but this movie is bad agnostic of genre. There’s no need to bother with the plot details because they are immaterial to the crucial flaw of the movie, which is that despite its platitudes about how romance is something felt between flawed, complex people, Materialists doesn’t give a shit about its characters. Dakota Johnson gives a real “go girl give us nothing” performance cementing her status as Hollywood’s favorite personality-less hire,1 while Pedro Pascal does a pathetic representation of a post-Chad Surgery incel2 and Chris Evans attempts to play someone who is supposed to be a good actor. But the actors are hamstrung by a cliche script3 that takes an extremely vacuous look at modern romance ripped straight from the social media headlines. Everyone is sad and miserable, everything is a petty comparison of wealth and body type, no one is close to genuine happiness—even a bride on her wedding day only ties the knot because she thinks her husband-to-be makes her sister jealous. No one’s heart swells with the fluttering pangs that come from being genuinely in love. Romance is a numbers math equation to be solved by salaries, looks, and the most surface-level desires. Also, everyone is a Bad Person™️4 who is unredeemable, until it’s time for the plot to prove otherwise.5 It’s all frankly quite boring. This is embodied throughout the movie with its tepid pacing and languid camerawork. It’s one big slow ride without any real depth of feeling or emotional rush behind it—the hallmark characteristics of being in love. The obvious retort for this movie is that it’s merely a reflection of what love is actually like for many people out there and Celine Song is drawing on her experience as a matchmaker. Whatever truth there maybe that people talk about love and dating this way, I refuse to believe they actually feel this way when it happens to them. Love deserves a better treatment than this.
She’s great in an interview but loses all charisma on screen.
This whole plot line is indicative of the kind of trash where people read one article and use it to lend the artifice of authenticity to characters, even though it amounts to nothing more than a bullet point in their background.
This movie is a boring entry into the girl falls for poor artist over rich guy canon of stories.
We have moved beyond the need for movies and TV shows to have characters literally say, “Why would you love me, I’m such a terrible person.” Thank you.
It could be argued that the movie is a long run around argument against the ways it treats love in the beginning, but it’s never exciting enough to be a worthy critique. It never comes around in a way that emotionally wins the point it wants to make.
There is also a very ham-fisted sexual assault plot midway through the movie that mostly causes Dakota Johnson’s character anguish for feeling like she’s not good enough at her job. This is the most perplexing side of the movie, as it wants to treat the topic seriously but only pretends to do so.