Hi chickens,
Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Mine was somewhat disastrous in ways that I will not get into here, but what I will say is that I have a lot of bruises on my leg and the entire back half of my body (and only the back half) is very badly sunburned. It was a weird weekend in that most of my friends were traveling so I was left to my own devices, which is to say I snuck on over to my nearest and dearest AMC Theaters on Friday for a 4:30 showing of Materialists. I left the movie in…kind of a bad mood! Regardless of my opinions, this is a film I would like everyone I’ve ever met to see and report back to me on, mostly because I feel like one’s thoughts on this movie could act as a sneakily revealing litmus test of sorts. More Materialists thoughts, and some other books I’m recommending and not recommending, below!
Materialists
Celine Song’s hotly anticipated follow-up to Past Lives is here, and it threw me for quite the loop.
The basic framework is simple: beautiful woman has to choose between the handsome rich guy and the handsome poor guy. Based on the trailers and marketing I was worried I was in for something saccharine and cliché, and was honestly impressed by how much of a willful misdirect the trailers were. Materialists is primarily interested in the way the search for true love makes us try to quantify the unquantifiable. It’s also interested in class insecurity, the dating/wedding industrial complex, and the inherent risk of rejection and personal safety involved in casual dating (I will note here that this movie includes a sexual assault side plot that I thought was rather clumsily handled). But a rom-com this is really not. There are some funny lines, yes, but the humor is largely predicated on the bleakness of dating in the modern age - mainly, we’re laughing at the unappealing, cheerfully misogynistic single men who believe they’re overdue for their beautiful, thin, chill, sufficiently interesting girlfriend. (For what it’s worth, this movie’s single women don’t get off much easier - their standards are also painted as far too lofty, especially the conservative lesbians).
Lucy (Dakota Johnson looking disgustingly beautiful), a matchmaker, meets Harry (played sweetly if a little mutedly by Pedro Pascal) at a client’s wedding - he’s handsome and charming and, of course, exceptionally wealthy. She wants him as a client but he’s more interested in her specifically. They begin dating and it is lovely - expensive restaurants, laughably large bouquets of roses, keys to his (undeniably well-decorated but very empty!!) $12 million Tribeca penthouse apartment. In a conversation over dinner, Lucy is surprisingly frank in telling Harry what she likes most about him: he makes her feel valuable. He tells her she is already valuable, but the pragmatic Lucy is mostly impervious to such compliments.
Also occupying Lucy’s mind is her ex-boyfriend John (played by Chris Evans wearing a lot of flannel), a long-aspiring actor and part-time cater waiter, who she reconnects with at the same wedding where she meets Harry (he’s working as a waiter). Lucy and John dated years before, when Lucy, too, was trying to pursue acting. It did not end well, mostly because John couldn’t afford to give Lucy the life she wants - the life she is ashamed to want, but wants nonetheless. In the present, there’s a wistful warmth and a wounded-puppy yearning between them, but in a flashback to their breakup we see them yelling in the street over things like $20 parking and restaurant cancellation fees, things we know the debonair Harry wouldn’t give a second thought.
SPOILERS HERE: It’s probably unsurprising that Lucy picks Captain America at the end of the movie, choosing genuine, unquantifiable love over her “checklist.” Please let it be known that I am not someone who thinks love cannot conquer all, but this turn in the narrative is so unearned that I found it somewhat baffling. That Lucy is - say it with me - a little materialistic! is a core tenant of her character. That’s not meant as an indictment, it’s just true - she says herself multiple times throughout the movie that financial comfort is at the top of her list of dating priorities. As she tells Harry, she wants to feel valuable. There’s a genuinely funny scene when Harry first takes Lucy back to his place, where while he’s in the throes of passion, her eyes are wide open looking at the palatial apartment behind him, peeking around the corner to see what other beautiful surprises might be in store.
There’s a shift in the movie (that aforementioned sexual assault plotline, carried with spectacular pathos by Succession’s Zoë Winters - more of her, please!!) where we’re meant to see Lucy realize that those pesky intangible qualities are far more likely to lead us to true love than checking off a series of boxes. But despite this movie’s dogged insistence that Lucy has learned her lesson, I left this movie feeling pretty profoundly bleak about the whole thing. Only a few scenes after basically telling John she can’t date him because she hates his shitty car and he thinks halal cart chicken and rice is an appropriate anniversary meal and that both of those things make her resent him and resent herself for wanting more, Lucy decides to take John up on his proposition of eternal, unconditional love anyway, and accepts the grass ring he presents her with in Central Park. Materialists seems to believe this is a happy ending, but (call me cynical) I found it almost impossible to believe that these two people are capable of a long and happy partnership, given what we’ve been told about their deeply mismatched values (and how poorly their relationship went the first time around).
Most of Letterboxd seems to think this was a very romantic movie, so I can’t tell if I’m crazy. It should be said that I am a known skeptic of Chris Evans’ acting skills, and while I like Dakota Johnson, she’s definitely better known for her sardonic affect than she is for delivering monologues about the mysterious nature of love - it’s possible I could have looked past the above logical sinkholes if the passion between the two leads was believable enough. If it sounds like I hated this movie, I honestly didn’t - Celine Song’s writing is solid, if occasionally overwrought, and the direction is very nice-looking. But I definitely walked out of the theater with a bit of a pit in my stomach. On an entirely separate note, something else that’s pretty undeniable is that between this, Past Lives and Challengers, Celine and Justin Kuritzkes seem to be endlessly tortured by the existence of Celine’s ex-boyfriend. Are they okay, do you think??
The Portrait of a Mirror - A. Natasha Joukovsky
We had our first 90 degree day of Chicago summer this past Wednesday. On my way back from picking this book up from the library I decided it would be really lovely and much needed to get a mint Oreo Blizzard from DQ and sit in Oz Park for a while and read. My Blizzard melted almost immediately and I crushed the first 50 pages of this in one rather breathless sitting. The Portrait of a Mirror has pretty much everything I want in a book, which is to say, it’s about two WASPy couples who basically swap partners unknowingly and have passionate affairs of varying types, but it’s also about art and myth and management consulting and tech mergers and 2015 zeitgeist. The writing is luscious and the wit is lethal and the whole thing is a loose retelling of the myth of Narcissus, which is genius! I learned a lot and I had a great time, and that’s really all I’m looking for.
It’s time for my (abbreviated) Sabrina Carpenter thinkpiece
What a predictable stir the announcement of Sabrina’s upcoming album, “Man’s Best Friend,” has caused. My (highly original) thoughts: this new album art is intentionally provocative and meant to whip up conversation ahead of her album release about Sabrina and her sexual politics and her self-awareness or lack thereof and her place in the broader bubblegum pop star machine. She’s read the thinkpieces (or, her PR team has) and she’s using them to her advantage. Letting a man walk you like a dog, so to speak, is antithetical to every single song on “Short n’ Sweet,” and no bone (ha) in my body thinks she’s about to roll over (ha!!) and release an album about groveling for a boy. She’s not only in on the joke but the one creating the joke in the first place, and I urge those monologuing about how she’s “sold out” to use their brains. Fin!
The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
I don’t really know how to describe this book. It’s the first Irving book I’ve read and I requested it from the library because I like plots about hotels, kind of? (Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Lost in Translation, you get it). I will first say that this is an exceptionally well-written book. I was consistently in awe of its quick wit and worldbuilding and characters that feel half-human and half-cartoon character in a very specific way that will be poking around in my head for a while. On the other hand, this book is absolutely bananas, and is fucked up in a manner I can only describe as gleeful. Trigger warning for probably every single thing that could potentially trigger someone. A non-exhaustive list of things that pop up in The Hotel New Hampshire are: a motorcycle-riding bear named “State O’ Maine” and also “Earl,” incestual siblings, a taxidermy dog that scares someone so badly they die, an Austrian hotel inhabited by violent radicals and nonviolent prostitutes, a plane crash, a woman who always wears a bear suit, a car bomb. I don’t even know what to say. There is a film version with Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe playing the incest siblings that is supposed to be spectacularly awful and I will be watching it tonight.
That’s all for today!
xo Lael
I appreciate your analysis of Materialists. I share your cynicism about John and Lucy growing old together. There just can’t enough on screen to certify Lucy’s transformation.
Personally, my biggest frustration was the bluntness of the script. Past Lives was so economical with words, so thoughtfully understated, but I swear Johnson said some variation of the same thing in every conversation. Perhaps that accessibility helped facilitate attention and positivity from a wider audience than Past Lives garnered, but woof: seemed like Song didn’t trust us to follow a story that wasn’t exactly cryptic.
It’s not you! Materialists is like the least romantic movie imaginable. There’s zero chemistry between Dakota Johnson (who does look incredible) and Chris Evans and there’s no way one could think that they are in any way “in love.” Literally unbelievable. The more I interrogate this film the more it annoys me but I didn’t hate it.