Hal Kitchen
The last few years have brought forth some exceptional new talents into the filmmaking landscape and one of the most celebrated is Celine Song who achieved the astonishing feat of earning Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Academy Award nominations for her very first feature. Emotional cheating drama Past Lives was one of the most acclaimed films of 2023 as it managed to perform an intelligent and compassionate dissection of its three protagonists conflicting emotional needs, while tying them into the complex nature of an exilic identity. It was high-brow, smart and yet accessible and deeply emotional, capturing the complexities of an emotional journey that spanned decades in a compact and graceful package that left plenty of room for the audience to fill in the gaps with their own experiences. The fact it was so widely embraced was surprising, but heartening, and put a target of Song’s back as far as her next big endeavor: Materialists.
As we see here, Song has taken the impetus of that first feature and ran with it, bagging some of the biggest stars of the last ten years, if not perhaps, the biggest stars of ten years ago? More of that next. The plot of her new film Materialists, as pitched in the trailer, contains many echoes of Past Lives, as it is also structured around the story of a professional and sensible adult woman who finds herself torn between a man from her past and a potential new conquest. However, there are several elements that distinguish Materialists as not merely a comedic romantic drama but a Rom-Com—capital ‘R’, capital ‘C’. For one, our indecisive heroine (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker, perhaps the most stereotypical rom-com protagonist job imaginable, who finds herself torn between a handsome rich businessman (Pedro Pascal) and her working-joe old flame (Chris Evans).
Pascal is currently riding pretty high, after the success of his star-making turns on The Mandalorian, The Last of Us and Game of Thrones, the actor is the film’s one sure fire bankable star. Which is surprising given that on paper, fellow headliners Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans should be the real draws here. They’re younger, and starred in two of the biggest money-making franchises of the last decade with Fifty Shades of Grey and The Avengers respectively. They’ve also both shown some formidable acting chops in films like Knives Out, The Lost Daughter, Cha Cha Real Smooth and Snowpiercer, to name just a few.
However, their stocks have both fallen dramatically since those franchises closed shop, with them both etching their names on some of the biggest critical and commercial bombs of recent memory, Madame Web, Ghosted and The Grey Man. They could both use a real leg up and fortunately Materialists seems exactly what they both need. It’s respectable, but light enough to have broad appeal, and plays to their strengths of earnest emotion, light adult comedy and genuine star chemistry. Between them, their star power should put the kind of eyes on Materialists that Past Lives had to earn slowly through word of mouth, and Song’s cache and talent could well stage, well comebacks would be strong, neither of them went away, but they’ve been slumming it for a while and it’d be good to see them in something worth a damn, especially Evans.
The question is, though, is this project Song bringing them respectability or is it her sinking to their level? There’s no doubt it seems comparatively lightweight compared to the knotty emotional drama of Past Lives and we’ve definitely seen studio A24 trying to lean into their viral marketing bag a lot more, trying to take their offbeat brand mainstream—just check out the trailer for Death of a Unicorn to see what I mean—Materialists‘s trope heavy ’00s rom-com stylings of white people tumbling into bed in their glossy New York apartments could well be another step in that dumbing down process.
That remains to be seen but, although I am anticipating something that lacks the specific and personal nature of Past Lives, if one reads between the lines of Materialists‘s marketing, evidence of the same creative soul does shine through. It’ll be interesting to see what Song does with these tropes, how she subverts them and how she twists them to explore the emotional needs of her characters. There is the potential for a film every bit as good as Past Lives here, these are three great actors and there’s nothing wrong with an extra bit of froth now and then. A cappuccino can keep you up just as much as a flat white can, if that’s your thing and I can very much see the merits of taking the tone and themes of Past Lives and packaging them in a the breezier structure of a classic rom-com. It’s not sent Materialists straight to the top of my “most anticipated films of 2025” list or anything, but I’m interested in seeing this lot get their Nora Ephron on.
