The world has got confused about what constitutes a romantic comedy. Every second review of last year’s One Day described that David Nicholls TV adaptation as a romcom despite its plainly being no sort of comedy. Did Richard Curtis accelerate this upending of cinematic taxonomy? At any rate, here we are.
Celine Song’s gorgeous, intelligent follow-up to her Oscar-nominated Past Lives offers a particularly knotty source of further confusion.
The director herself places Materialists within the genre. She lists pictures such as Annie Hall and Broadcast News as influences. It certainly has the shape of a romantic comedy. Dakota Johnson, still boasting the best hair this side of Renate Reinsve, stars as Lucy, a matchmaker plying her trade amid the dentists and lawyers of New York.
Attending a wedding, she bumps into a hugely wealthy – and, crucially as it transpires, tall – financier in the currently unavoidable form of Pedro Pascal. This Harry offers the perfect answer to a question she encounters every day. Every female client wants someone over 6ft; each wants someone as loaded as her new pal. But rather than make merchandise of him, Lucy half-accidentally decides to keep him for herself.
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Meanwhile, John (Chris Evans), her likable, impoverished ex-boyfriend, an actor and waiter, lurks in the background with sad Basset-hound eyes.
They could once have made a cracking Doris Day flick from that scenario, Day as the no-nonsense professional, Rock Hudson in Pascal’s role and Tony Randall in Evans’s. Okay, that last swap doesn’t really work, but you get the idea.
Except Song doesn’t really seem particularly interested in generating laughs. Her script is consistently smart, but rather than trade in quips it relies on sharp, often cynical observations on this society’s commodification of human relations. “He makes you feel valuable,” Lucy says at one point.
The client can do what she wants with that last word. The audience will suspect, deep down, the matchmaker means it more literally than she pretends. Harry is a “luxury good”. Marriage is a “business deal”.
Matchmakers exist in all societies – Barry Fitzgerald played one in Hollywood’s most famous romanticisation of Ireland – but the current version speaks to the very American notion that, with the right personnel and the right equipment, a dedicated professional can achieve anything. Get a man to the moon. Land on the beaches of Normandy. Find a white man who makes more than $250,000 a year for a thirtysomething psychoanalyst from Brooklyn Heights.
A shocking late plot development – one that has irritated some US critics – presses home how uneasy Song (who once worked as a matchmaker) is with this way of thinking.
It’s not just that the film dodges gags for socioeconomic philosophising. For all the surface beauty here – Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography is to die for – the film is cooler and stiller than the regulation romcom. As in Past Lives, Song surrounds her New Yorkers with an attention-focusing mantle of silence. Gaps in the dialogue offer us opportunities to take the characters more seriously than we otherwise might.
So maybe Materialists is not quite a comedy. It is, however, hopelessly, delightfully Romantic (my capitalisation). We are, surely, not giving much away by admitting that the film, as anything in this genre must, ultimately sides with emotion over financial objectification. It does so without compromising the integrity of its rigorously drawn characters or inviting its fine leads to soften their disciplined performances.
Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic. Just don’t go expecting There’s Something About Mary.
Opens on Wednesday, August 13th
