[in the voice of the Movie Trailer Guy]
He was a boy, hoping to fall in love with a romantic comedy. She was a movie, who dressed like a romantic comedy and talked like a romantic comedy. But as Andrew Gruttadaro was about to find out: Not everything can be as it seems…
I’m here to tell you that Materialists, Celine Song’s sophomore film about a matchmaker who finds herself in a love triangle, is a liar. Specifically, the second trailer for Materialists, in which the movie employs the voice of the Movie Trailer Guy to hearken back to the classic rom-coms of yore, is a liar.
For ball knowers—and in this case, when I say “ball,” I mean the kind of New Year’s Eve one at the end of When Harry Met Sally—this faceless voice is a signifier. We’ve heard him speak in the trailers of You’ve Got Mail, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Moonstruck, She’s All That, and countless more. We heard his weird British cousin try to fill in for him for the Notting Hill trailer. This voice conjures memories of and feelings related to not just rom-coms, but specifically the rom-coms from the genre’s heyday, when Nora Ephron was poet laureate, when Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan and Richard Gere starred in movies about deeply infeasible yet undeniably heart-wrenching relationships. Movies that moved with a lilt, bathed everything in sunlight, featured characters with seemingly made-up jobs, placed far too much importance on the love lives of those characters, and always ended happily ever after.
The rom-com flourished in theaters until Iron Man ruined everything and suddenly movies with modest budgets that make modest profits became bad business. Fans of the genre were banished to the cold halls of Netflix, which did its best to be a refuge—until franchise creep infiltrated those walls too. But at some point, the tide started to turn; the squelched cries of a forgotten class (the people who like rom-coms) began to rise into the ether once again. At some point—and I’d probably, just to be totally random, locate that point somewhere around when Anyone But You was raking in over $200 million at the box office—everyone seemed to agree, yes, we ought to make rom-coms again.
This is the landscape unto which Materialists released its second trailer, cloaking itself in white roses and valiantly pronouncing itself as a film that will quench rom-com enthusiasts from undying thirst (via a Coke and beer).
I just have one question: How dare you?
Actually, two questions: Do you think my culture is your costume?
Despite the lengths it has gone to present itself as one, Materialists is not a romantic comedy. What it is instead is a pretty serious movie that meditates on love, employs sexual assault as a plot device, and seeks to dissect and confront the structures and tropes of the rom-com. There is no banter. There is no jumping-off-the-screen chemistry between Dakota Johnson and her two leading men, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. There are no witty sidekicks. There isn’t even really much drama between the three main characters—everyone acts very maturely. There are montages, but the montages are more sad than funny. And the flirting is mostly numbers-based, and delivered by Johnson or Pascal or Evans with the same cadence as Alexa, if Alexa were a little horny.
More on Rom-Coms
None of that means Materialists is a bad movie. It’s sleek and beautifully curated and cool. There is a line in it that, as a new parent who no longer has control over his lacrimal system, made me cry. And Song’s interest in love—the way we humans flock to it in the face of the fact that all relationships are transactional—is careful and deep; her ideas about romance, and how she smuggles them into a romantic movie, more than makes the argument for Materialists’ existence.
But first of all, now is not the time to be questioning the motives of rom-coms. That time was long before rom-coms were unceremoniously shuttled out of movie theaters! Having been so cruelly deprived of theatrical rom-coms for like a decade-plus now, we’ve come to realize that we want both: the classic genre flick, with all its wonderful tropes and trappings, and the more serious movie that smartly dissects the genre and what it says about modern sociology. We’re pro-rom-com now! We want them back!
And that leads back to the ultimate point: Don’t use that aching desire as a weapon against us. It’s not nice, and it only leads to disappointment. I would’ve left the theater happy to have seen Materialists. Instead, I’m out here ruing, once again, the industrial forces that robbed—and clearly still rob!—us of one the most watchable genres in film history. Instead I’m out here fighting fights for the Movie Trailer Guy, who can probably defend himself.
