Love vs. money in a modern romance

 

   Director Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023) was a small wonder,  a movie about fated love untracked by time and circumstance. In Materialists, Song dips her toe into Hollywood waters, employing a name cast — Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans — as she flirts with and sometimes ignores rom-com cliches.

   Johnson's Lucy works for a matchmaking service called Adore. She's good at her job. For Adore, matchmaking extends an algorithm mindset. Before dating begins, the matchmaker obtains a list of requirements. Perhaps a lasting union will occur.

    Set in Manhattan, the screenplay, also by Song, creates a triangle. Harry (Pascal) is the rich brother of one of Lucy's clients. Charming and self-assured, Harry sees Johnson’s Lucy as a potential match. A superior strategist, she'll make a great helpmate, and it doesn't hurt that she's attractive.

   A match with Harry may make sense for Lucy, as well. She broke up with her struggling actor boyfriend (Evans) when she got sick of being down-and-out in Manhattan, a place where the good life comes with price tags that exclude wannabes. 

   Lucy meets Harry at the wedding of one of her clients. Conveniently, Evans John happens to be working the same wedding as a waiter for the company that's doing the catering. It seems apparent that neither John nor Lucy has totally moved on.

   Materialists outsmarts the average rom-com, which doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been even smarter. Enjoyably satirical when it comes to elucidating the impossible demands of a privileged generation, the movie doesn't commit to a rom-com blueprint nor does it rip it to shreds. 

   Song occupies a middle ground that sets up the movie's major problem: Should a marriage make sense in much the same way as a business merger? Is it a bad bet to surrender to love, which can't be reduced to a series of boxes one checks? 

    Considering the charm and posh surroundings in which Harry effortlessly moves, he’s playing with a clear advantage. But Song doesn’t turn Harry into a jerk; he’s sensitive and considerate, a man of taste and intelligence.

     John, on the other hand, is a 37-year-old actor who's close to the point where he may have to accept that his life as a cater waiter isn't as temporary as he once hoped.

     Moreover, Lucy seems to have abandoned the idea that two people can survive on love and a dime. When Harry takes Lucy to his apartment for the first time, she responds to his amorous advances, but also manages to eagerly eye the richly appointed surroundings. 

    In a flashback, we see the incident that drove Lucy from John. Short on funds, he couldn’t pay for parking before a dinner marking their fourth anniversary together. She called it quits.

    A pivotal incident occurs when Sophie (Zoe Winters), one of Lucy’s clients, experiences a terrible outcome on a date. Lucy's conscience is tweaked. For her, Sophie had been a lingering failure; in other words, Sophie was a tough sell in the dating market.

     Materialists leaves it to us to decide what to think about a world in which money has become the most meaningful metric and where few seem to regard virtue or decency as an asset.

     It’s not possible to make a rom-com, even a self-aware one, without some contrivance. Although Materialists has its share of them, many are easy to overlook. A law suit brought by Sophie against Adore receives short shrift, and Song ties up a variety of loose ends -- not all of them neatly.  

    Materialists ultimately kneels at the altar of formula, although it tries to expand its reach with a prologue and an epilogue involving prehistoric romance. Did the movie need to introduce cave people to prove that love hasn't necessarily evolved? I don't think so.

    Still, I wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing Materialists, which is well-acted and engaging. I wish, though, that I felt the same way about it as I felt about Past Lives; i.e., that I had seen something truly special.

        

A haunting look at roads not taken

 There are moments in many lives that can, in retrospect, be viewed as pivotal: relationships that didn’t blossom, loves that went unexpressed, and connections severed by geographical separations. 

 Such moments can prompt "what-if" thinking, the act of trying to imagine the nature of a life that didn’t happen from the perspective of one that did. 

  Nora (Greta Lee)  and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the two main  characters in director Celine Song’s Past Lives, put their toes in "what-if" waters. They try to find each other after years of separation. That may sound like a romcom formula but life seldom evolves in formulaic ways and neither does Past Lives.

   Nora left Korea at the age of eight and moved to Toronto with her family. She grew up and relocated to New York City to pursue her ambitions as a playwright.

    Hae Sung remained in Korea, where he became an engineer. He didn’t marry but never abandoned the idea that he might reunite with the girl whose departure left him saddened and lonely.

    As Nora and Hae Sung approach adulthood, they make an on-line connection and begin regular conversations via the internet. Nora breaks off the talks when she's about to embark on a writer's residency in Montauk, Long Island. 

    Perhaps she doesn't want anything to interfere with her work or maybe she realizes that time and distance have created an unbridgeable gulf between herself and Hae Sung.

     During her residency, Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro), the writer who will become her husband. He'll become worried -- not in a crazy way -- that if Nora reconnects with Hae Sung, their marriage will dissolve.

    It takes 24 years for Hae Sung to visit New York in hopes of reuniting with Nora. Together, they ponder their lives and the meaning of lost connections. When they meet, you can see them searching each other's faces for traces of their younger selves.

    Nothing happens on the sly. There are no secrets here. Nora's husband understands that his wife needs to meet with an old friend.

    In the movie's best scene, Nora, Arthur, and Hae Sung are seated at a bar on Manhattan's lower Eastside. Initially, Nora translates for her husband but soon winds up having a revealing conversation with Hae Sung, which her husband can't understand. Arthur knows only rudimentary Korean -- and not much of that. Hae Sung's English is spotty at best.

    Song introduces speculation by the characters about the way connections are formed: Is it fate or perhaps encounters in previous lives that are recurring in the present? But Song isn't pushing an explanation. She's acknowledging the mystery of ties that are difficult to relinquish.

      Song has a delicate touch, so don't be surprised not to find volcanic emotional explosions or tidal waves of passion that conquer calm consideration. That doesn't mean the movie stirs no emotions.

    Grief, albeit perhaps gentle, inevitably accompanies the sadness of unsatisfied yearnings and roads not taken. Even if past and future lives are possible, we still must live them one at a time.