Hey, y’know what’s a perfect movie to watch after you propose to the love of your life? Like. What’s a good film to see with a woman you’ve proposed to seventeen hours ago? Give it a guess. Don’t look at the post title. Did she say yes? Stay tuned!
Broke Boi Propaganda
The answer is Materialists, a movie about pretty people being superficial and their dating preferences. The A24 film by Celine Song stars matchmaker Dakota Johnson, broke boy Chris Evans, and suga daddy Pedro Pascal in a film that’s dressed as a romcom, with ambitions of depth, but is ultimately just a romcom.
The film’s message is… all over the place. The main character, Johnson, is admittedly shallow, and hungers for a physically attractive man who can financially fulfill her childhood poverty trauma without regard for love or emotion. She finds this ‘unicorn’ in Pascal, while contending with, and also stringing along, her broke and emotionally unintelligent, earnest ex-boyfriend Evans. I don’t have an issue with run-on sentences.
The film explores concepts of feminine value, masculine value, dating difficulties, sexual assault while dating, the transactionality of love, and some other third thing. Materialists probes these concepts on a very surface level, but never really thinks things through. This is very much unlike when I thought through proposing to the love of my life. Whom I love. Whom I proposed to. Did she say yes? Stay tuned!
Male Insecurities
Truth be told, all the film did was make me feel insecure. I have no reason to be insecure, though. I am 6’3”, totally and entirely employed, and also super duper fit. But Materialists still made me feel insecure. Sad. Inadequate.
The film makes a point to underline that, if men undergo surgeries to gain some height, if they’re rich, they can totally get with anyone. Rather, women would flock to them. That’s… depressing…
Like. What if. What if I wasn’t already in a great relationship with a smart, super hot, kind, and considerate woman whom I had just proposed to. What if I wasn’t 6’5” and definitely employed. I’d be even more sad. Like. Darn.
But the film doesn’t go further. The juxtaposition to Pascal’s tall, rich character is supposed to be Evans’ earnest but poor lover. It didn’t work. If Johnson really was meant to be a superficial gold-digger, then Pascal shouldn’t have been suave and smooth and good at talking to pretty women. Hell, she would have approached him by his own accounts. Johnson would have overlooked Pascal’s social inadequacies. The physical aspect never would have been a plot point at all. Instead, Pascal is tall and hot and considerate and thoughtful and emotionally intelligent and sexy- his only flaw is that he’s kind of falling for the same superficial norms in dating that Johnson subscribes to.
Evans, on the other hand, is sweet and generous and understanding and loyal and ridiculously emotionally intelligent. He’s unbound by jealousy and sexual insecurities, and only held back by financial bounds. If Materialists had been bolder, he’d also have been kind of ugly. Maybe short. Maybe fat. Maybe not white. But instead, it’s Chris Evans. Who’s almost as pretty as my pretty girlfriend, whom I had just proposed to the day before seeing the film Materialists. Did she say yes? Stay tuned!
I could keep going. I could harp about the fact there’s this one ridiculous scene with dancing couples at an interracial couple’s wedding where every couple is some form of non-heterosexual and some flavor of not caucasian, but the protagonists are, ultimately, white and blue-eyed and skinny. I could compare it to the other scene with dancing in the far superior film Sinners, which I haven’t published my review for. Unfortunately Materialists is, in conclusion, totally tone-deaf.
I know that Celine Song wanted to say something impactful and deep, but at the end of the day, I think the movie is half-baked and cowardly. The ideas she wanted to explore are ultimately upended by its casting choices, which singlehandedly undo the work done by the script, which itself is need of another few go-arounds. I rate this film:
YMMV
I saw Materialists in theaters in Melbourne, with my beautiful partner, whom I had proposed to just hours ago. Did she say yes? Stay tuned!
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