I am officially moved into my new apartment! It’s been a rough week, since I basically didn’t have a day off since last Monday. Really hoping to rest up more this weekend. I still have various errands to run, like getting rubber feet so my furniture doesn’t slide around on my floors. I have to say, creative momentum is a real thing. On top of general exhaustion, taking a few days off the zine to focus on my life really feels like a lifetime, and it’s harder to jump back in. I’m almost done with the first chapter interiors, and I’m sure I’ll build myself back up over the next few days.
This week, let’s review the movie Materialists by Celine Song. I saw it this Thursday because I had a short day at work, and I like the cast. Overall, I did enjoy the movie. Good performances, well-shot and paced, good editing. There are hints of some real strength coming out of their corner every now and then, the kind of thing you hope to get from a more intellectual romance movie. That said, the movie ultimately doesn’t work the way it should, and I want to talk about that.
Spoilers.
Materialists stars Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. Johnson is a matchmaker in New York who used to date Evans, a struggling actor, and ends up dating Pascal, a rich, perfect guy. As you could imagine, the way these movies go, Johnson and Evans end up together after Johnson realizes things can’t work with Pascal. That actually is the first issue I have with the movie, that things didn’t work with Pascal. Like, obviously that would happen, despite him being Pedro Pascal; however, Johnson leaves him because there’s no love between them, and there’s no real demonstration of that fact. One could argue that everything Pascal does throughout the movie indicates he is thoroughly in love with Johnson, and Johnson is the problem. She lectures both Pascal and Evans multiple times that they don’t love her for the reasons she doesn’t love herself. While that could indicate a much smarter level of story writing, the actual thrust of the movie goes the other direction. I mean, this is a movie where everyone is directly communicating everything they think and feel; there’s no subtlety about the actual issues, just complete misses of them. Without getting into “how I would do it” territory, the movie lacked a scene or two demonstrating that Pascal doesn’t really love Johnson, so that their breakup seems substantive, rather than Johnson telling an adoring boyfriend he doesn’t love her.
The second big issue is that we don’t get enough time on why Johnson wants to marry rich. It’s a cliché, a superficial standard in romance movies. You would typically expect it of the young, inexperienced maiden, rather than the thirty-something Johnson who’s seen it all. We have a pretty good flashback scene to her and Evans’s breakup. They’re fighting on their way to a restaurant on their fifth anniversary, and Johnson breaks up with him for being too broke to get her nice things, because fighting over money makes her feel bad. The movie actually makes a good case for why this works for her character: She grew up poor and saw her parents fight over money, so she both wants nice things to feel valuable and doesn’t want to recreate childhood trauma. At the end of the day, though, there’s not enough connective tissue. We don’t spend enough time with why she can’t make herself feel valuable, or why she can’t be the one to bring money to a relationship now that she has the high-status job. At the end of the movie, two things happen. First, Johnson is offered a promotion to head the firm, which she’s reluctant about. Seems like taking a huge salary increase would resolve all her worries about money and love. Evans also says he’s going to bend his pride some to make more money and move up in the system, so that his broke-ness doesn’t stress their love. Before this point, we didn’t see anything that explained why he didn’t want to have an agent and refused to leave the catering job for a restaurant gig. Like, money is a real issue in life, but the movie doesn’t make a case for what it should mean to the characters, or why they couldn’t move forward in the past.
That really speaks to the larger issue for the movie. There really is a lot going on that speaks to the difference between material circumstances and desires and the deeper emotional needs people have. For instance, I really liked this scene where one of Johnson’s clients was about to run out on her wedding. The bride admitted that she most wants to marry the groom because her sister is jealous of how much better he is than her husband, so the bride feels like she won. Johnson flips that to say the groom makes her feel valuable. It’s a really good encapsulation of the premise, that we’re attracted to these “shallow, meaningless” material assets, like looks and money, because they reflect something real and meaningful. The issue I’m circling is that the movie ultimately doesn’t focus on that.
From the outset, Johnson, the matchmaker who has formed nine marriages, knows all of that already. She describes her job as being like an insurance adjuster, because she’s constantly reviewing vital statistics to make a judgment about who to pair up. Her success in forming marriages indicates that she knows how to read the tea leaves and connect people effectively. Her success at work means that she doesn’t have a lesson to learn about how materialism isn’t shallow. That’s probably why the movie focuses on the difference between dating and love, with the dichotomy that dating is work and love is easy. A simple romantic fantasy that also doesn’t add up, since it’s apples and oranges. Of course feeling an emotion is the easy part; dating is still work, even when you love someone, because of materialism, just like Johnson saw when she broke up with Evans in their twenties. It doesn’t even make a strong statement about that dichotomy, either, since dating Pascal wasn’t work at all, despite no love, and dating Evans requires a lot of work, despite love. If love is worth putting in the effort of rearranging your life in dating, then why isn’t dating worth the emotional labor of breaking down your psychological barriers to love the perfect guy?
In fact, I would argue that the movie sidesteps the more important materialism, to its detriment. Throughout the movie, there are scenes of Johnson interviewing clients about their preferences, and getting a bunch of shallow responses. A forty-something man who wants to stop dating immature twenty-year-olds and start seeing twenty-seven-year-olds. A woman who wants to only date white people until she runs out of white suitors. A guy who only cares that the woman he sees is fit. Johnson herself speaks to this issue personally. Throughout the movie, she and basically everyone refers to adult women as girls, which is pretty blatant infantilizing. This connects with how Johnson herself suggests that Pascal see a woman ten years younger than her so that in a decade, that woman would look like her instead of her mom. Johnson complains about listening to clients ask for, “No blacks, no fatties,” all day like bigoted children.
None of that is the materialism that the movie addresses, though, because the main character is Johnson, who wants to marry rich. Instead, the conclusion is that socioeconomic background and political views don’t really matter, so long as you love each other. Those are the two exact wrong things to call out in terms of dating and love. Those are both things that speak to your values, desires, and worldviews, which need to align in a strong relationship. Obviously, you can match with someone on that level while not matching their background and politics, but statistically, those things are pretty lockstep. More importantly, Johnson and Evans have the same socioeconomic backgrounds and political views, while Pascal grew up rich and directly tells Johnson that he’s the only rich guy she could actually stand spending time with (presumably because of social and/or political values).
The movie ends up affirming the cold dating math of our matchmaking protagonist, while framing everything around a fully separate argument to throw out the math. Johnson is reluctant to accept the promotion at the end because she was considering resigning, since she no longer believes in dating math. If that were a subtle clue about the actual intent of the film, then it would be smart, but I don’t think it is. After all, it doesn’t address why Johnson is outright promoting large age-gap marriages on the basis of the man’s presumed sexual attraction to fetishized youth. Nothing in the movie changes her initial assessment of Leslie, an important client, as not having niche appeal and thus being unmarriable. Like, there’s actual improper considerations and impossible standards in the formula, but whether or not you’re willing to put in more effort to make a relationship work isn’t one of them. The big issue is that Evans wasn’t as interested in improving his standard of living as Johnson was at one point? It’s a pretty easy fix, especially since Evans hates his current standard of living. Johnson and Evans throwing away the math is just them agreeing to try harder and make more money. What about Leslie? Does she still lack standout qualities, or have you shifted your formula to focus on the more important things, or what?
It’s not hard to see this cast and crew putting together a movie about how money and sex and all the “shallow” stuff really matters, and how you have to face and address the deeper reasons before you can move on with life. We don’t get that. Johnson knows why she cares about money from the start and is never challenged on her shallower views, so it all comes down to Evans putting in a little more effort. Also, there’s this thing with a surgery to make you taller by breaking your legs? A thing I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist in real life, and also wouldn’t work since your arms and torso would become visibly too short for your Great Dane legs. Johnson’s coworker mentions it at the beginning, and you can laugh it off as a silly plastic surgery joke, but then we learn that Pascal has had that procedure (which isn’t why Johnson broke up with him, it just reaffirmed her initial feelings of not being capable of loving him, which is totally different). Like, it’s a weird sci-fi thing in the middle of a very grounded movie. Unless I’m wrong and there are a bunch of rich people breaking their legs.
Life in the Gutters 