Choosing between perfect or less-than lessons from Celine Song’s “Materialists”

BLU-RAY REVIEW / SDR SCREENSHOTS

(1) Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, an upscale matchmaker, and Chris Evans plays her ex-boyfriend John, a struggling actor in New York City. (2) The film opens with a caveman and his female love, and he twists a small flower into a ring.

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“MATERIALISTS”

Blu-ray; 2025; R for profanity, nudity, adult situations, smoking

Best extra: Commentary by director/writer/producer Celine Song

REMEMBER HOW Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” begins? Prehistoric ape-men figure out how to make a weapon out of a stone, and when that weapon sails through the air, it transforms into a spaceship.

Well, perhaps Canadian/South Korean writer/director Celine Song (“Past Lives”) was referencing that iconic opening with the start of her second feature, “Materialists.” Song goes a little further up the evolutionary scale with a caveman and a cavewoman. The caveman presents the female with a bouquet of daisies, out of which he plucks one, twists it into a ring, and places it on her finger. So, I guess they’re engaged?

In her commentary, Song explains the daisy ring represents the beginning of materialism. Okay. A quick cut transports us to present-day New York City, with the glamorous appearance of Dakota Johnson, striding along the street in impossibly high heels. We soon learn her name is Lucy and she works at an upscale matchmaking/dating service called “Adore.” When she gets to her office, Lucy is celebrated with a cake for successfully matching nine couples who ended up getting married. We later learn that, Lucy, much like Jane Austen’s “Emma,” is great at getting people together, but when it comes to herself, she manages to remain, deliberately, single.

(1) The caveman presents the female with a bouquet of daisies. (2) “Materialists” was mostly filmed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It opened on June 13 and grossed nearly $109 million worldwide. (3&4) Lucy has a challenging client, Sophie (Zoë Winters), who can’t find the perfect match. (5) Lucy’s boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), has a surprise party for her when it’s announced that one of Lucy’s matches marks her 9th couple to get married.

Then, at a wedding, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), to whom she describes her perfect mate, whose most important quality must be that he’s fabulously wealthy. As it happens, Harry is single, good-looking, charming and (drum roll) fabulously wealthy! While the two are flirting, Lucy runs into her (handsome) struggling actor ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), who’s working as a server with the wedding’s caterers. And there you have the set-up for “Materialists,” which can’t seem to decide if it’s a comedy, or a heartfelt social commentary in which, despite the rampant materialism of today’s society, love can still conquer all. (sigh)

“Materialists” is slickly produced and the three leads do their best with the often clumsy dialogue and somewhat formulaic and predictable plot. That said, fans of Johnson, Pascal or Evans, or those who simply want a romantic escape from reality, are bound to love it.

(1&2) A bride-to-be, one of Lucy’s matchmaking successes, has cold feet right before the ceremony, so Lucy gives her a pep talk. The talk works, and a perfect wedding takes place. (3) At the reception, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the best man, and the brother of the groom. (4) Afterwards, Lucy reconnects with her ex, John.

VIDEO/AUDIO

Sadly, A24 didn’t release “Materialists” on 4K Ultra HD, especially since it was captured on 35mm film stock and mastered in TRUE 4K. The film structure gives the imagery a striking romantic feel, with its light wash of film grain and excellent color palette set against the cityscape of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Song and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner (“Past Lives”) were inspired by a 1950s Gordon Parks color fashion photograph of a woman wearing a long turquoise/silverish flashy gown with white gloves.

The Blu-ray is still very good, with excellent detail and natural facial toning, but a notch lower than what it could’ve been in 4K with HDR grading and the extra resolution.

A nice plus, a Dolby Atmos soundtrack was provided, providing a wider soundstage with its street environmental sounds and wedding celebrations. The organic moody score with Daniel Pemberton (“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”), has plenty of fidelity, and can be purchased on White/Blue vinyl at the A24 store or Amazon. It includes the love theme “My Baby (Got Nothing at All) from the Indie band Japanese Breakfast and two tracks from R&B singer/songwriter Baby Rose.

(1) Lucy and Harry hook up. (2) They later attend the off-off-Broadway play in which John is appearing. (3) Lucy and Harry have a serious talk.

EXTRAS

The Blu-ray bonus features include:

• “The Math of Modern Love: Making ‘Materialist’” (17 mins.) interviews with the cast, production designer, and Song. As a former matchmaker, the director talks about what her clients were looking for in a person, and it would always come down to numbers. “Weight, height, income, and age, things that I can quantify. But, a funny contradiction, I knew that’s not how love works.”

  
  

• “Composer Deep Dive with Japanese Breakfast” (11 mins.) an interview with Japanese Breakfast band members Michelle Zauner and Craig Hendrix.

  
  

• “Six large postcards of behind-the-scenes photos” is an A24 standard insert.

  
  

• “Running Commentary” (116 mins.) with writer/director Celine Song, a 14-year resident of New York City.

This contains the most meat, despite her extreme reliance on the words “amazing” and “incredible,” with which she praises just about everyone involved in the production, as well as the amount of time she spends explaining what’s going on, to viewers who would certainly have already seen the movie.

Song reveals that some aspects of her screenplay come from her own life experiences. For six months, she worked as a matchmaker in New York City. She explains that the opening prehistoric scenes were shot in Durango, Mexico, and accompanied by “ancient earth sounds.” Her idea was for audiences to wonder, “Is this the movie I wanted to see?” What she intended was to show, she says, the “ancient feeling of love.” Cutting from the cave-dwellers to New York was meant to emphasize that the city is civilized, “modern, materialistic and cynical.” Song says she wanted to show that “things that are very material and non-material are always in contrast.”

She shares that the telephone voice of “James,” one of Lucy’s disgruntled clients, was actual that of her husband, and the recording was made at the couple’s kitchen table. She says that many of the supporting actors, such as Zoë Winters, who plays Sophie, another of Lucy’s clients, were cast from audition tapes. (If Winters looks familiar, she played Logan Roy’s assistant/girlfriend in the final season of “Succession.”) For the roles of Lucy’s boss and co-workers at Adore, Song wanted the women to be “alpha, and unabashedly feminine … almost aggressively estrogen … like ‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’ but feminine.”

Song talks about a montage scene, in which we’re shown a series of Lucy’s clients listing what their requirements for a partner, a possible reference to the (much, much funnier) montage in Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have it.” Song says that she wanted it to represent the “commodification and objectification of human beings.”

A proponent of shooting scenes in one take, Song feels that “every cut is a defeat,” going on to praise the three (amazing! incredible!) stars for having “killed it” in lengthy scenes that were shot in one take. Song points out that the play, “Tom and Eliza,” in which John acts and Lucy attends, was actually a play Song wrote that had been produced off-off Broadway.

In her defense of the film, Song insists it is not a rom-com, but a “direct and brutal thing, not a lighthearted romantic movie … with a bit of noir …” pointing out Lucy’s “dark night of the soul,” after one of her clients is assaulted on a date she arranged, as an example.

An interesting comment Song makes is her belief that “wealth in New York City is connected to private space; while poverty is connected to public space.” She tried to show this by having many of the scenes involving John either be shot on busy New York streets, or in the messy, chaotic apartment he shares with two other men; while we often see Lucy or Harry in gorgeous, spacious apartments, or intimate fancy restaurants.

Song spends some time discussing the phenomenon of leg-lengthening surgery, a plot point in the film. It’s one of the only plastic surgeries exclusively for men, she explains, and the procedure can add as much as six inches to a man’s height. But once he has it, he “can’t run for the rest of (his) life … it’s like having been in a car accident.” Nevertheless, Song insists, the added inches can increase a man’s “value in the marketplace of dating.” Wow.

— Peggy Earle

(1) During a trip upstate, John and Lucy happen upon an outdoor wedding. (2) They crash the reception and share a romantic dance. (3) An affectionate moment in Central Park.

SPECS:

• 50 GB disc

• TRUE 4K mastering, but downconverted for this presentation.

• 35mm film stock captured on Panavision cameras in the Super 35 format, 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

• Video bitrate: Varies in the 30 Megabits per second range. Running time is 116 minutes.

• Box office: $36 million domestically, and worldwide $109 million, with a production budget of $20 million.

• Rotten Tomatoes: Top critics’ 78 percent, Moviegoers 66 percent

• Metacritic: Critics 70, User score 6.1