Crisp, sharp and seductive, Celine Song’s Materialists plays, at times, like a Sex and the City episode that got binned because it dared to tell too many truths about dating. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a successful matchmaker catering to wealthy Manhattanites looking for Mr or Miss Right. As cool and precise as her business card, Lucy is like a cross between a therapist and a deal-maker, sizing up her clients for their age, height, weight, income and desirability.
“Marriage is a business deal and always has been,” she says. But she’s no cynic. Her patter comes salted with enough home truths to usher even the fussiest commitment-phobe down the aisle. Half of them, you imagine, must be a little in love with her.
Plus she’s played by Dakota Johnson, whose cat-that-got-the-cream purr has never been better deployed than it is here. This is the film Fifty Shades of Grey wanted so desperately to be.
At a wedding party for one of her successful matches, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a charming, ultra-rich hedge fund manager — a “unicorn” in her book, a mythical male — yet he doesn’t want her services. He wants her. Gentle, persistent, Pascal brings a Clark Gable energy to their scenes together, which have an old-world sophistication that recalls the rom-coms of yore. Not one from the Aughts or Nineties, where Kate Hudson spends too long on a tanning bed, but the screwballs of the Thirties and Forties, such as The Philadelphia Story or The Lady Eve, in which love conquers all although only after first boxing clever for 90 minutes on the subjects of class, wealth and power.
You could hear a pin drop as Lucy and Harry counter and parry across the table: Song cocoons them in a beautiful hush, broken only by the harps of Daniel Pemberton’s score, suggesting intimate ground being broken, or a spell cast. They both feel a little above the dating game — Lucy because she wrote the rule book and Harry because his wealth more or less overturns the board.
But there’s another player about to enter: John (Chris Evans), Lucy’s former boyfriend, a struggling actor, now living in Brooklyn, who revives memories of the younger, freer girl Lucy was before she became the Mata Hari of wealthy Manhattanites. What does Lucy really want? Can she tell any more, or has she imbibed too much of her own spiel?
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In one sense, what follows is one of the oldest plots in the book — whether to marry for love or money — although one of the most refreshing things about Song’s movie is its honesty around the subject. “It’s about value for you,” Lucy says, squaring the circle for a client whom she has matched with a rich fiancée, only for them to get cold feet.
Should love be a commodity and relationships just a sound investment? Song, who directed the Oscar-nominated Past Lives, a wonderfully wise film about another love triangle, is not so foolish as to be drawn into a simple answer. The rom-com is not dead, as some say — people still keep lining up to see them, no matter how often they descend into a series of bridezilla mishaps — but it is guilty of dishonesty on the subject of money, on the one hand saying it doesn’t matter, while secretly thinking otherwise. The tramp turns out to be a millionaire at the end, anyway, thus saving us our embarrassment.
Some critics have accused Song of a similar disingenuity — deconstructing rom-com cliché only to sucker us with a big “love conquers all” ending — but I think this misunderstands what she is up to. She’s not deconstructing the rom-com, she’s taking its themes seriously.
Audiences flock to these movies for a reason. I’ve no idea what people lured in by the trailer expecting a Kate Hudson flick will make of it — maybe that there aren’t enough pratfalls into wedding cakes? — but fans of sharp dialogue peppered with brutal honesty, and the old-school delights of watching movie stars circle, prowl and pounce on one another like big cats, will feel expertly seduced. And you’ll feel OK about yourself in the morning.
★★★★☆
15, 116min
Togetherness of an altogether more horrifying kind drives the subtext of Michael Shanks’s guignol horror-comedy, Together, which stars Alison Brie and her real-life husband Dave Franco. They play Millie and Tim, two New Yorkers who have just moved into their dream house upstate, just as their relationship reaches its sell-by date.
“I’m not sure if we love each other or if we’re just used to each other,” Millie says one evening. Then, on an afternoon hiking trip, the two drink from a natural spring that turns their co-dependence into a horrifying physical condition: when they kiss, their lips fuse; after sex, they are unable to decouple, at least without the help of something sharp.
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“What are we, running a f***ing three-legged race?’ Tim yells when he wakes up to find Millie’s leg stuck to his. Emergency Metaphor Alert! As an allegory for the cannibalism of coupledom, Shanks’s film hammers home his point about as subtly as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance did last year, with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as an ageing actress at war with her younger self. Like Fargeat’s film, it’s never boring — Shanks piles on the blood, gore and the jump scares — but it’s all subtext. It’s one of those films that seeks constant reassurance that you’re Getting the Point, but the cleverness empties the film of anything genuinely unsettling. You may get the point, but not the movie.
★★★☆☆
15, 102min
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