One of the reasons I love cinema is that there are a thousand ways for something to go wrong over the course of a film. It can lose you at almost any moment. Or it can have you the whole time, only to discover when the lights come up that it doesn’t make very much sense at all. The concept of a perfect movie is more personal than any objective feat of perfectly executed tropes and twists. A perfect movie has to work, and most importantly, it has to work for you.
Materialists does not work for me. The problem with Romantic Comedies is that if they work, you can ignore all the logical inconsistencies because you’re caught up in the romance. If they don’t work, all you have are logical inconsistencies. In my most charitable reading, Materialists is about that very tension. It is a movie filled with inconsistencies and details that just don’t quite work. There’s a world where that’s on purpose, and the audience is supposed to realize they’re being tricked. Except Celine Song doesn’t execute her trick well enough and still gives us the classic romantic comedy ending. So it’s half trick, half earnest attempt.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to MEMEFORUM to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.