movie review: the materialists

The Materialists
Review by Jeff DeRouen

Folks, you will probably never see a scathing review from me in this publication. That’s because I am an artist, a filmmaker myself, and I know how hard it is to make a movie. I can usually find something I like (or even love) in every movie I see whether the whole thing works for me or not. Also, I don’t take time to go see movies I don’t think I’ll enjoy (my apologies to How to Train Your Dragon), so a full-on castration of someone’s art is not something I will ever do.

That being said, I wish I loved Celine Song’s new movie, Materialists. Her previous film, Past Lives, was on every critic’s “best of” list and was nominated for a ton of awards. It’s well-written, funny, and deeply emotional. It’s a beautiful film, a masterpiece even, so I was really looking forward to this one, and Materialists starts out great. It’s fast, fun, funny, sexy, and manages to play on our expectations of a romantic comedy – and it does it EXCEPTIONALLY.

The actors absolutely swim in Song’s terrific dialogue while basking in the beautiful glow of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s lens. Everything is here – it’s the perfect setup: the story of a matchmaker who thinks of relationships in terms of graphs and spreadsheets and boxes is torn between two men and then hijinks ensue – should be a slam dunk for an adept filmmaker like Celine Song, even with a genre-subverting approach.

The movie rocks for over an hour and then something bad happens. Something that abruptly changes the tone and, instead of being a one and done development, becomes a full-blown extremely clunky and heavy-handed subplot that runs through the VERY LONG third act.

I won’t say what the something is, but whether it works or not is being hotly debated between the cinema experts in the blessed marketplace of ideas. Some folks like where the movie goes, but it derailed the whole train for me. I could be totally wrong about all this and I’m seeing it again this week to make sure. Different points of view can often make me look at something differently, and, who knows, maybe that’ll happen here. I’m open to that.

But my first impression is that the story is undercooked, the tone is all over the place, and at two hours, the film feels about thirty minutes too long. There is a world where the 90-minute version of Materialists is considered a romantic comedy gem, because the bones and first hour of this movie are impressive and captivating.

So, ultimately, I was disappointed, but I’m gonna keep buying tickets to Celine Song movies because I love that we live in a world where she gets to make her films her way. And I would take Materialists over a How to Lose a Man in Four Hours (or whatever it would be) any day. She’s taking big swings, and I love watching when artists get to play that ballgame.