Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in Materialists
MATERIALISTS
No one can singlehandedly revive the fading genre of the swoony big-screen romance. Yet with only two features under her belt to date, Celine Song is certainly giving it a good shot.
The writer/director's 2023 Past Lives, Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Original Screenplay, was one of the most trenchant, wistful, moving love stories moviegoers had been treated to in ages, and an intensely satisfying one despite a finale that left its heroine sobbing on the sidewalk. (We viewers got to sob from the comfort of our cineplex seats.) Song's new Materialists is far more conventional, but it, too, catches you off-guard in the best possible way. Working from a premise that would've inevitably lured Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lopez, or Katherine Heigl once upon a time, Song presents us with the highest of high-concept setups that seems to ask about a half-dozen familiar rom-com questions at once. “Can an expert matchmaker find romance of her own?” “Can estranged exes find their way back to one another?” “Can true love triumph over unimaginable wealth?” Such queries were also routinely posed in the comedies of Austen and Shakespeare, and while Song's script isn't quite in their league, it's easy to fall for Materialists the way you fall for, say, Emma and The Taming of the Shrew. This is romantic silliness treated with absolute sincerity, even painful seriousness, and its effect is frequently breathtaking.
Although saddled, mercifully briefly, with a framing device that ties its characters to prehistoric ones – a conceit that doesn't work primarily due to the tackiness of the sets and the too-perfect teeth of its caveman – Song's film unfolds in present-day New York City, where Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a coveted matchmaker with the Manhattan-based service Adore. A voluntary celibate, Lucy has traded her hopes of love for helping others land their own life partners, her winning strategy tied to finding two people equally satisfied with one another's looks, physiques, finances, and willingness to settle. (As she tartly reminds one picky client, “You're looking for a nursing-home partner and a grave buddy.”) At the wedding reception for the ninth couple Lucy has successfully paired, she meets brother-of-the-groom Harry (Pedro Pascal), who is, in Lucy's business parlance, a “unicorn”: tall, straight, handsome, smart, confident, funny, and unspeakably rich. The billionaire takes an immediate interest in Lucy. She explains that she'd rather have him as a client than a lover. And who should walk up just as their flirtatious badinage starts to simmer? Lucy's former boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a cater-waiter who's clearly still carrying a torch for his ex. Harry, the 40-something financier who begins to actively woo Lucy, is the complete package. John, the 37-year-old struggling actor with a crap apartment and two roommates, is not … though he does have shared history with Lucy and, y'know, looks like Chris Evans. What's a seemingly contented single gal to do?
Hundreds of years' worth of romantic comedies, and our instinctive, collective urge to root for the underdog, would seem to make that answer a no-brainer: “Go with John, girl!” But as with everything in Materialists, our feelings about the matter aren't quite so simple. To start with, there's the Pedro Pascal of it all. Few current actors so comfortably exude charm without smugness, and while Harry has been written as too good to be true, we gradually realize that this time it might actually be true. Even when the other shoe drops, as it must, Harry's “flaw” turns out to be touching and sweet and a little bit sad, and Pascal is so inherently decent and adorable that Harry's embarrassment and shame just become reasons to love him more.
Meanwhile, despite Evans' gorgeous yearning and Captain America jawline, Song and the actor hardly fashion John as any kind of ideal alternative. He may obviously adore Lucy, but John is also directionless, stagnant, and prone to self-pity and anger – as well as really, really poor. Rom-coms may like to pretend that money doesn't matter. But everyone knows that, in real life, it absolutely does, and Song's screenplay is intensely incisive about the toll that limited finances can take on relationships. The one flashback we get to Lucy's and John's life as romantic partners, which takes place on their way to a fifth-anniversary dinner, displays in agonizingly relatable terms how even a $25 expenditure can be a crushing blow (particularly for two wannabe actors in NYC), and Song never lets us forget the extent to which modern romance can be, and oftentimes is, transactional. Lucy outright states that she'll only marry for money; Harry admits to taking Lucy to one pricey restaurant after another in order to impress her; John keeps rehashing low little he had, or has, to offer. You'd think all this talk about dough and the lack thereof would make Materialists, as a screen romance, feel cynical. It doesn't, however. It makes it feel bracing and honest, and keeps you in a constant state of suspense. Past Lives, after all, gave us a happy(-ish) ending, yet it wasn't the one many anticipated. Will Song's latest follow suit?
Let me stress that the movie is hardly the wholly melancholic time I may be implying. Although her comedic dialogue isn't generally ha-ha funny so much as laughing-on-the-inside funny, Song, who's also a playwright, composes divinely witty turns of phrase and has enormous fun with the assembly line of Lucy's more hopelessly demanding clients. One of them, a middle-aged Wall Street type played by Eddie Cahill, is looking for someone more mature than the mid-20s women he's been dating – might there be a 29-year-old available? (There's a knowing in-joke in Cahill's casting; on Friends, he had a seventh-season arc as Rachel's boyfriend Tag, whom she eventually broke up with because he was too young and goofy.) As much as she views the modern dating scene with a clear eye, Song isn't blind to its occasional ridiculousness, evidenced by the Adore co-workers' eardrum-piercing shrieks of glee every time someone makes a successful match. Song also isn't beyond some cheeky, amusing self-promotion. Outside the theatre following a production of his current play, the show's poster, slapped in the center of the frame, separates John from Lucy and Harry. The play's title? Tom & Eliza. Its author? Celine Song.
The film's comedy, though, isn't why Materialists resonates so deeply, and audiences expecting a formulaic, lighthearted frolic might be shocked when the movie takes a swerve into abjectly uncomfortable territory with its subplot – an admirably sustained one – involving the sexual assault of Lucy's client Sophie. (Past Lives admirers might also be shocked once they recognize the voice of Sophie's unseen assailant.) This isn't the sort of detour one expects from this genre, and Zoë Winters' incensed, heartbreaking portrayal of the victim isn't expected, either. But the storyline's inclusion proves necessary, as it reminds us of the inherent danger, in all its forms, in searching for a perfect love that may not exist. While her situation isn't as brutal as Sophie's, Lucy understands, or rather comes to understand, that there's also true threat and fear in marrying for money, or marrying without any, or choosing to not marry at all, or the simple act of engaging in arranged-dating in the first place. Pascal and Evans are soulful and expressive, but it's Johnson whose instinctive, emotionally expansive performance lends the movie genuine, real-world complexity. Lucy morphs from a character who thinks she knows it all to one afraid that she doesn't know anything, and in the manner of all great screen romances, you pine for her, for everyone's, Happily Ever After … even though, here, you're not sure what one might ultimately look like.
Not until the end credits, that is. Because even though her film is overflowing with beautifully composed monologues and dialogue exchanges that acting students will perform for decades to come, Song reserves her coup de grâce for the largely wordless, din-infused action as the names of cast and crew members scroll up the screen. I urge you to see Materialists. If and when you do, I also urge you to not leave before its very last second, because a whole story with a beginning, middle, and end transpires beneath that three-minute list of names and duties, confirming Song as the rare playwright/director whose gifts are visual as well as literary. This is what truly separates Song from talents such as David Mamet, John Patrick Shanley, and Nora Ephron, and her single-take sequence at the close first made me smile, then lean forward to discern its many details, then well up with joy. As movies go, that's about as Happy an Ever After you could ask for.
THE LIFE OF CHUCK
You don't ordinarily have to talk yourself into enjoying a movie. I'm not sure we're ever meant to. But a few hours after seeing writer/director Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck, and leaving pretty disappointed in it, I wound up on the phone with my dear friend and fellow King fan Angie. She had read the author's short story from his 2020 collection If It Bleeds, I hadn't, and in describing the ways in which I felt the film didn't work, it gradually dawned on me that it did work – at least for me – based on how much that felt untethered in the moment made perfect sense upon reflection. I still think Flanagan's work is awkwardly presented and thematically undercooked, and it might be those things in King's prose, too. Yet in vocalizing my thoughts, I found myself less perturbed by what I didn't like and more enraptured by what I did, and wound up more moved in talking through the experience than I ever was actually experiencing it. I'm not sure that reaction is indicative of a good movie, but it certainly suggests a sneakily effective one.
A three-part narrative told (as in the novella) in reverse chronological order, The Life of Chuck opens with its Act III titled “Thanks, Chuck,” which is set on what might be Earth's final day. Natural disasters are occurring worldwide; California is breaking off into the ocean; the Internet appears to be down for good. Trying to remain positive in the face of the escalating nightmare are high-school teacher Marty Anderson (Chiewetel Ejiofor) and ER nurse Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan), ex-spouses who, like the rest of their neighbors, are made increasingly aware of one Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), whose name and face are suddenly everywhere. He's on billboards promoting “39 Great Years!” He's on radio and TV testimonials after all other programming has vanished. His face and bearing are illuminated in suburban windows following a city-wide, perhaps global, blackout. But who is he? Why is he?
“Thanks, Chuck” offers a smattering of hints, and the mystery will be essentially solved with the respective Acts II and I “Buskers Forever” and “I Contain Multitudes.” For my money, though, and especially in retrospect, I didn't necessarily want the mystery solved. I just wanted to keep hanging out in the divinely human presences of Ejiofor and Gillan, and in the divinely grim setting of Flanagan's recognizable dystopia. If you can ignore the dialogue that sounds Stephen King-y to its teeth (replicating believable speech has never been one of the author's strong suits), there's a lot to love in the 45-minute downer of “Thanks, Chuck”: the unsettling quiet; the mordant humor; the incongruously chipper narration by Nick Offerman (!) that will continue throughout the movie; the occasional visual audacity; the cameos by a friendly Harvey Guillén, a sensational David Dastmalchian, and a truly stunning Matthew Lillard. Most of all, though, I appreciated the blasé realness of this subtly horrifying end-times scenario, wherein a massive, unanticipated sinkhole requires citizens to walk five miles to and from work – which they do, because they don't know what else to do, and which they react to with dazed, wholly empathetic confusion. In its rendering of paralyzing fear that feels thisclose to panic, there's more than a touch of HBO's superb series The Leftovers to this Life of Chuck opener (along with a healthy dose of King's The Stand), and the film might've been a classic had it ended with its Sopranos-finale blackout that climaxes Act III.
For better and worse, it doesn't. The better is the extended dance sequence that makes up most of Act II's “Buskers Forever,” with Hiddleston's Chuck, Annalise Basso's recently dumped-via-text Janice, and Taylor Gordon's street drummer going to town on six minutes of pulsating percussion and madly inspired Mandy Moore choreography. This scene is electrifying, if senseless to even its characters, but also undermines the fundamental problem with The Life of Chuck: The man, as an adult, means nothing to us. That'll change in “I Contain Multitudes” when he's played, in younger versions, by the director's son Cody Flanagan as a seven-year-old, Jacob Tremblay as a 17-year-old, and especially the powerhouse Benjamin Pajak as an 11-year-old. Yet despite his top billing and titular character, Hiddleston does practically nothing but dance (and infrequently lie in a hospital gurney), and for all of narrator Offerman's insistence on Chuck's importance, the guy remains a complete cipher. That may be the point: He's an Everyman; he's one of us; his story could be our story. If so, though, it's a drab and unilluminating point, and Hiddleston is too naturally vibrant a performer to be saddled with such a dull, empty role. It's too bad that, like the audience, Chuck doesn't know why he spontaneously danced in that town square. If he did, the man might've been somewhat interesting.
With the Act I of “I Contain Multitudes,” we at least have a fuller picture of Chuck. But we also have a fuller picture of The Life of Chuck, and the picture being painted ain't entirely pretty. Yes, it's sweet to watch the boy soldier on through unimaginable family tragedy and discover his inherent love of dance (which Pajak performs exceptionally well), and I was totally on-board with the casting of Mark Hamill as Chuck's wise, drunken grandpa and Mia Sara – where has she been?! – as his kind, ethereally youthful grandma. But the segment also introduces a long-delayed, prototypically Stephen King supernatural angle that the material doesn't require. More damning still, it reveals Flanagan's outing as one of those movies that some of us can't help but gag at: the ones that pushily tell us to Cherish the Moment and Live Every Day to the Fullest; the ones that remind us that We're All Connected. I actually quite like 2005's widely loathed Best Picture winner Crash. I also don't want any more films that remind me of Crash.
Because most everything I adored about Flanagan's movie took place in its first half, and most everything I found problematic or worse took place in its second, it was easy to leave The Life of Chuck on a disheartened note. Still, after an unexpected amount of vocal rumination, I can't label that a deterrent. Its highs are awfully high and its lows are more disappointing than deal-breaking, and even the more noxious moralizing moments wound up enriching elements that moved me in that “Thanks, Chuck” opener. Plus, of course, the film finds Tom Hiddleston hoofing like his life was on the line – and here, for this character, it might very well be true. There are definitely worse ways to spend two cineplex hours than heeding Walk the Moon's advice to “Shut Up and Dance with Me.”
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON
Although I've only seen its three series entries one time apiece, what I most admire about the films in DreamWorks Animation's and writer/director Dean DeBlois' 2010-2019 How to Train Your Dragon trilogy is how they almost seem to transcend animation, their scope, effects, and emotional urgency suggesting a vastly detailed real world fashioned as a (CGI) cartoon. But now that DeBlois' new How to Train Your Dragon is the primarily live-action adventure that was previously merely implied, what's left? A lot of terrific visuals, certainly, but also a scope made run-of-the-mill through too many similar fantasies of its type and figures and narrative beats that now, ironically, appear distractingly cartoonish. As a live-action re-creation, the movie is impressive, in its way. It also boasts close to zero in the way of personality – a true zero in terms of fresh personality – and it didn't surprise me at all when, halfway through our screening, my favorite 11-year-old, a mad fan of all things dragon, laid her head against her seat's built-in snack table out of apparent boredom. I would've done the same, but I was on the clock.
The movie's one true saving grace is Mason Thames, who played the young hero of 2022's horror hit The Black Phone and is a live-action doppelgänger for the animated dragon-whisperer Hiccup. He's a delight, and although Thames likely studied his 2010 forebear's movements and reactions fastidiously, his comic readings are frisky and surprising – he's the only member of DeBlois' cast who suggests a life independent from the product of numerous hard-working, underpaid animators. (Reprising his vocal role as Hiccup's Viking-leader dad, Gerard Butler is also fun, but his live-action boisterousness and bravado aren't significantly different from what we got before.) The other actors, among them Nico Parker as Astrid and a weirdly dull Nick Frost as the young dragon-slayers' trainer, merely go through the expected motions, and while there's no faulting the effects, there's also no getting around the fact that replacing the original's CGI dragon Toothless with another CGI Toothless is no net gain. Less onerous yet just as needless as Disney's remakes of The Lion King, Aladdin, et al, this slavishly faithful How to Train Your Dragon is merely a time-killer for the easily amused, noteworthy only for toppling Lilo & Stitch for family-friendly box-office dollars this past weekend. The original Lilo & Stitch, from 2002, was also written and directed by Dean DeBlois. I'd suggest there was some irony there, but these days, live-action remakes of animated classics are where irony goes to die.
