“Materialists” Is a Feast of Talking Pictures

Words are actions, as anyone who’s ever been told “I do” or “You’re fired” knows. Yet, after nearly a century of talking pictures, most directors fail to depict talk as vigorously or imaginatively as they do physical action. The bulk of the work is usually left to the cast: the routine version of a movie involves pictures of actors acting, like audiovisual fragments of plays. This may explain why some of the most interesting approaches to talk in movies have come from directors who started as playwrights and thus, when they turn their attention to the screen, are sharply aware of the differences—whether Sacha Guitry or Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Kenneth Lonergan. Add another to the list: Celine Song, whose second feature, “Materialists,” marks a major artistic advance over her début, “Past Lives.” Both films offer similarly copious dialogue, but the earlier one offered a far less distinctive approach to the screenplay and the filming; the new one, at its best, displays startling inspiration not just in Song’s writing of dialogue but also in the way she provides this dialogue with a cinematic identity.

The triangular setup of “Materialists” is similar to that of “Past Lives.” In both films, a woman’s romantic relationship with a man is shadowed by the arrival of a man with whom she’d previously been involved. “Materialists” stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy Mason, a professional matchmaker in Manhattan who, at a client’s wedding, meets the groom’s brother, Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy partner in his family’s private-equity firm. She wants him as a client; he asks her for a date. She agrees to go out with Harry, and then they begin a romance. But, at the wedding, she also encounters her ex-boyfriend John Pitts (Chris Evans), a struggling actor who’s working as a cater waiter at the wedding. Lucy rekindles a friendship with John—and, when she faces a crisis at work (more on that later), she confides not in Harry but in John, a choice that, rather than causing trouble, merely reflects it.

What’s most striking about “Materialists”—and what quickly distinguishes it not only from “Past Lives” but from the general run of romantic movies, whether dramas or comedies (and “Materialists” fits into both categories, uneasily)—is business. Song once worked as a matchmaker, and it shows, in the best way: the film feels built on the solid ground of knowledge: Lucy knows what she’s talking about, and Song knows what Lucy’s not talking about. Lucy has a flair for discussing her job, candidly and thoughtfully, both when she’s selling its services and when she’s describing it to acquaintances—and the porous boundary between those two modes makes for some shrewdly realized psychological twists. Early on, Lucy is speaking with several other female wedding guests about matchmaking and about the big subject that underlies it—love—while Harry is standing alone, close enough to overhear but far enough to be discreet. As he listens, it’s as if musical notes were floating through the room, cartoon style, from Lucy’s mouth to Harry’s ears. He falls for her thoughts before meeting her. When he sees her sitting by herself at the so-called singles table, he finds his place card and sets it next to hers. They hit it off quickly, his suavity and her bracing directness sparking off each other in dashing dialogue. They have such verbal chemistry that they’re practically already dancing together while sitting still.

Lucy is a former actress, and her abilities and discipline as a performer are key to her successes at work and to the impression she makes on Harry—indeed, on anyone. She has a controlled physical bearing, can read people on the spot, and is able to improvise the right sales pitch or conversational gambit accordingly. How much does Lucy believe of her own spiel? Is she a persuasive salesperson because she puts on a good show with a clear sense of what will work, or because she’s speaking from the heart and believes in the service that she’s selling and the way that it functions? It’s never clear—because Song hardly shows who Lucy is apart from her profession—but for about half the film, Lucy’s performance is thrilling. The ease with which she lets herself slip into the clutches of her own rhetoric and become, with Harry, effectively her own client is dramatically vertiginous.

When Lucy talks about matchmaking, she deftly translates the emotional fantasy of romance into businesslike concepts and terms, making love’s ineffable mysteries seem accessible by way of stark practicalities that can be itemized on a spreadsheet. This dualism imbues her high-flown and starry-eyed sales pitches with philosophical heft of a very particular kind, which the French writer Stendhal expressed aphoristically: “A banker who has made a fortune has one character trait needed to make discoveries in philosophy, which means to see clearly into that which is.” Her personality could almost have been deliberately crafted to unlock the vault of Harry’s heart. There’s a wonderful moment in which, responding to Lucy’s sharp questions about their relationship, Harry declares that she’s the kind of woman he’s looking for—“someone who understands the game, how the world works,” and “someone who knows more” than he does.

Song’s aesthetic distillation of these complexities and conundrums in “Materialists” is magnificent. Her dialogue has a terse but lofty zippiness and a dialectical pugnacity reminiscent of classic-era screwball comedies, in which romance is often inseparable from tightly meshed squabbling. Even more important, she develops an aesthetic of image and performance to embody the whirlwind ideas and the roller-coaster emotions that the dialogue conjures. The many scenes in which Lucy squares off verbally with one man or another are filmed with delicate, breath-holding poise, as if the characters were partners in acrobatics of delight and danger. (The cinematographer, Shabier Kirchner, brings wide-eyed clarity and wonder to the proceedings.) Most original and unusual of all is the kind of tense stillness with which Song endows the actors. At many crucial moments (including in Lucy and Harry’s first few dates), this stillness is established with the natural cool of self-control and professionalism and then veers into an astonishing near-sculptural artifice. (In this way, the acting both winks at and departs from classic-Hollywood styles.) In such scenes, Song films dialogue and sets text as if operatically, to the images’ orchestral accompaniment.

This triangle of invention in text, image, and performance lifts “Materialists” to a high level of aesthetic delight—for about half the movie. Then, the film falls with a thud, never to rise again. The fault lies with a sudden subplot, involving the sexual assault of one client by another, that plunges the story into mere dramaturgical mechanism. It’s not simply that there’s something grossly intrusive about the casual use of the horrific incident as a mere plot point; worse, the episode is a mask concealing an imaginative blank, a gigantic distraction that diverts attention from a crucial matter that the movie seems to be leading up to but then leaves unaddressed: character. Lucy and Harry spend lots of time together (much of it in his lavish Tribeca penthouse), but, to all appearances, they hardly get to know each other. John, coming back into Lucy’s life, doesn’t seem curious about her either; he merely takes aim, mockingly and self-mockingly, at her rational, box-checking mind-set. In neither relationship is there a sense of what affinities and differences are at play or why this matters, as Lucy tries to choose between the two men.

Song rightly discerns the exact moment when the story requires a crucial shift. But the turn that’s needed—one that could show who the characters are behind their dialectical façades—isn’t the one that comes. The characters don’t discuss their love lives, their religion, their interests—music, art, literature. Harry has a big in-wall shelf filled with coffee-table books (and Lucy’s there in front of it); were they chosen by a decorator; does he read; what does he read? She neither asks him nor talks about her own tastes. What do any of the characters do for pleasure and with passion? Where did they grow up? Who are their friends? Lucy confides her work crisis to John, but who would she have told if they hadn’t reconnected?

There’s another elision in “Materialists” that’s extraordinary in a story about love, character, and the rational and irrational aspects of romance; namely, sex. I don’t mean the depiction of sex; classic Hollywood movies never depicted sex but were often nonetheless filled with it, by suggestion. “Materialists” is nearly as pristine as a children’s film; a few moments of heavy kissing and embracing serve as forensic evidence that a relationship has become physical, but there’s no sexual tension. The script raises doubts about the power of reason to make deep-rooted matches, but there’s nothing onscreen to suggest the wild irrationality of desire and pleasure.

These avoidances of the marks of personality are nearly identical to the blanks that leave Song’s earlier feature, “Past Lives,” insubstantial. But, in that film, the protagonist’s professional life also remained a cipher; the dialogue never went beyond the dramatic demands of the moment, and Song’s direction felt in general as if she were protecting and presenting her script rather than transforming it. “Materialists,” by contrast, delivers a thrilling fullness of verbal incident and cinematic style—for half a film. That half connects the movie to modern classics such as Lonergan’s “Margaret” and to some of the prime independent films of the century. Business is the core of mumblecore, as in most of Andrew Bujalski’s films, such as “Beeswax,” “Results,” and “Support the Girls”; as in Joe Swanberg’s “Hannah Takes the Stairs” and his series “Easy”; and as in Lena Dunham’s series “Girls” and her film “Tiny Furniture.” That generation of filmmakers, with their loose aesthetic and their free approach to scripts, also took a full-spectrum approach to cultural life, and a candid one to sex. Song, whose relationship to classic cinema is stronger than theirs, borrows and repurposes its styles and its manner—but, rather than breaking through to reimagine and expand its possibilities according to the possibilities of modern times, she replicates and even reinforces its evasions and its silences. “Materialists” remains, for better and worse, all business. ♦