The latest movie I apparently didn't understand

If you didn't see the review I tangentially linked in Monday's post that was about something else entirely, I laid into Celine Song's Materialists with both barrels. I thought it was broad. I thought it was cliched. I thought it was shallow.

But then I read an article this morning that argued this was a satire of broadness. A satire of cliche. A satire of shallowness.

That's certainly what I would expect of Song after the astute observational skills she showed us in Past Lives, but I'm sorry, it just isn't up there on the screen.

Mild spoilers to follow, more about what the movie is doing than the plot.

I'm only two movies away from 7,000. I've got a big (and I mean big) viewing planned on Saturday to mark the occasion and you will hear all about it on The Audient. 

This is to tell you I've been around the block before when it comes to watching movies. I've seen a million (okay, maybe 500) satires and I know when a movie is trying to be a satire. (Usually.)

Materialists does not read to me as a satire. Not at all. It reads to me as a failure that can be discussed after the fact in the terms of "I meant to do that," in order to save the narrative around it.

The critical community disagrees with me. It has a 70 on Metacritic and an equivalent 7.0 on IMDB. That last is not critics, but it's exactly the same as the Metacritic mark so it suggests to me that both critics and audiences are feeling roughly the same way about the movie. A critic I respect, in fact a critic I used to write for when he was my editor, said that he would not see ten better screenplays than Materialists in 2025. 

Although it befuddled me, initially I dismissed this praise as a weird collective failure to see the true banality of a movie, akin to what happened last year when a lot of people liked Osgood Perkins' Longlegs and I ranked it as my worst movie of the year.

Then this morning, just after waking up and still in quite the fog, I read an IndieWire article by Samantha Bergeson that told me this was a critique of Hollywood and yeah, Celine Song knew exactly what she was doing.

Bullshit.

I mean, maybe. But still: Bullshit.

It does explain what seems like a total tonal failure on the movie's part, its excessive whiteness, its apparent existence within a 1990s, Sex in the City adjacent understanding of New York City.

But it is reasonable to argue, and I am currently arguing, that the experience of a movie you are having in the moment is key to whether the movie is successful or not. That's a rather obvious statement. 

But the premise of Bergerson's argument is that we are getting the movie wrong, even as "we" (not me) praise it. She argues that the praise for the movie comes from people who think of it as a successful romantic drama or a successful romantic comedy, modes the movie straddles quite awkwardly. (Because of the satire, Bergeson argues.) Praising it on that basis is even more absurd. At least a "she meant to do it" explanation is defensible about why the movie feels so weird. 

But Bergeson acknowledges that a straightforward interpretation of this movie is going to get it wrong, and that in fact many people have gotten it wrong. (In fact, this is the reason I clicked into the article in the first place -- I thought she was agreeing with me.) Which means the actual experience of it is unsatisfying if you are just looking at the broadness, the cliches and the shallowness. You have to have someone like Bergeson read more deeply into it to reveal its true meaning, and this feels like an exercise you'd only be inclined to do if you felt there had to be an explanation for why Song made this movie the way she did.

I don't want these thoughts to be confused as me wanting someone to hit me over the head with the satire. But I think you have to know at some point that it is intended as satire or else you are forced to take it at face value.

Materialists certainly has moments where it peeks its head out and says "This might be a joke" -- think about Pedro Pascal's comment "It's hard for me to believe this isn't the leg thing" -- but the film so quickly goes back into totally straight-faced mode that the moments don't strike us as part of a larger design. They strike us as colossal failures of tone management, and contribute to the heavily negative review already building in our heads.

Surely it is indefensible for our main character to tell her ex-boyfriend that she broke up with him because he was poor. But she does this in contexts where it is depicted as heart-wrenching. If Song wanted this to be satire, she buried it too deeply.

The thing I found even more of a stretch about Bergeson's argument, and a revisit might help with this, is that she considers it a satire not of the romcom, but of the movie industry in general. When Lucy (Dakota Johnson) talks about certain matchmaking candidates being a niche market, of course she is using the language of film distribution there. I'd argue that this has crept into general parlance enough that a real person might use it to talk about themselves or someone else, but Bergeson thinks it's an intentional deconstruction of the movie business. 

There is a chance I am wrong about all this and Samantha Bergeson is right. That's part of the reason I'm writing this. I am now uncertain enough of my 2/10 review (which translates to one star on the five star scale) that I want the current document I'm writing to exist, for me to point people to it. And say that at least I figured out that I might have been wrong.

But I don't know if this warrants a revisit. I'll have a number of long plane trips coming up between now and October -- something I should probably tell you about at another time -- and I could easily fit in a second Materialists watch on the plane. It times out perfectly to be available. 

But also I have to consider the most salient aspect of our response, critical or otherwise, to any film: I just didn't like it. A film can be doing this or that or the other thing, and it's possible that even if you know it's doing that, it doesn't make the film any better. You are still left with unlikable characters and cliched scenarios for nearly two hours, and that's no fun. 

Critics have to write their own response to a film, and often don't have the luxury of pondering that response for a full week. They certainly don't have the luxury of reading other critics and seeing their take on a movie, nor should they. You have to go in fresh, forming your thoughts only on what the film is giving you in those two hours. Only if you see something there do you dig into it further to find alternate takes that might make it better.

I did not see something there in Materialists, and until I read a more convincing argument to the contrary than the one Bergeson mounted, 2/10 is where I'll stay.