"Materialists," "Too Much," and the Modern Rom-Com

0:05Hi, everyone. Chloe here. Today, we wanted to share a great conversation by our wonderful colleagues from the New Yorker's podcast, Critics at Large. Every week, staff writers, Vincent Cunningham, Nomi Fry, and Alexander Schwartz pull up chairs at the Critics' Roundtable to dive into the latest pop culture obsessions across books, film, TV, and more. Since we recently had Celine Song on our show, we thought you'd love this episode, Materialists, Too Much, and the Modern Rom-Com. In the episode, you'll hear the critics unpack the ever-evolving world of romantic comedies, how the genre has shifted, what's driving its resurgence, and why we're still hooked on stories of love.

0:44Stay tuned for the full conversation, and if you enjoy it, be sure to follow The New Yorker's Critics at Large wherever you listen to podcasts.

0:57Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture, right now and how we got here. How are you guys? Good. Doing great. Good. Glad to be back after a week off for our country's holiday.

1:23Our country's holiday. It is what it is. How are you, Vincent? I'm great. And I'm excited to celebrate a better holiday. Because friends, we're gathered here today to discuss, to celebrate the state of the rom-com. That's right. the romantic comedy. They used to be a staple at the box office. And even though that's not really the case anymore, there has been a trend in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years of trying to reimagine the rom-com for today, whatever that means. And by whatever means, possible. We're going to dig into this a little bit more later in the episode, but let's give the listeners a little teaser.

2:03What do we think's going on with the rom-com in 2025? Well, the rom-com, as you said, Vincent, used to be like a mega commercial proposition, right? But I think with the advent of the tentpole IP type movie as kind of the only commercial proposition in town, the rom-com has weirdly become kind of, if not actually indie, then a place for potential experimentation. You know, we're in yet another cycle of is the rom-com dead? Long live the rom-com. I think we've been here before a few times. We're back again in 2025. But if it's dead, people still keep wanting to make them, to watch them, to discuss them.

2:51But it's true that it doesn't have the kind of mainstream cultural purchase that it used to have for sure. And to your point about the cyclical nature of the rom-com and its life and death, this is not the first time that we've talked about this and tried to explore the state of the rom-com. Way back on Valentine's Day 2023, can you believe it, were we ever so young, The New Yorker published a roundtable discussion where we talked about movies like Bros, You People, and Shotgun Wedding. Do you remember any of these? Starring Josh Duhamel and J-Lo. There you go. It took me so long into rereading that to remember what Shotgun Wedding was.

3:29The abyss that was the film You People did come more readily back to me. But Shotgun Wedding was truly forgettable and then I forgot all about it. Yeah, sometimes that's what it's for as well. I mean, we're here because there are these two new properties that we were curious to discuss. Celine Song's movie, Materialists, which is being billed as the return of the rom-com, and Lena Dunham's Netflix show, Too Much. We have these two women who are saying, I love the genre, I want to reclaim the genre, and we are going to talk about if they have. So today we're going to be talking about our favorite rom-coms from the Screwball era through the 90s, and we're also going to be considering these new entries into the genre.

4:14And the question I want us to consider is, is there anything new for the rom-com to do? That's today on Critics at Large, our will-they-won't-they with the rom-com.

4:33So, as we mentioned, we're going to get into materialists, we're going to get into too much, but maybe it bears laying some groundwork. What are some must-have elements, Alex and Nomi, of a romantic comedy? What are we looking for just to begin with? I think there should be a pleasing balance between fantasy and reality. It should be, to an extent, relatable, the plot and the characters, but it has to reach for the stars in some way. Like, it has to have some element of wish fulfillment. and that equilibrium is hard to get, but when it's achieved, it's perfect. I'm thinking about like Pretty Woman, for instance, which is of course completely fantastical, but has a kind of core of subjective relatability, like in its characters.

5:28All right, I have a radical answer. Here's what needs to be in a romantic comedy. Full penetration.

5:38I actually myself do prefer a little sheet rustle, although, you know, I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of it. No, I'm going to say romance and comedy. And you're all going to say, well, that's obvious. But you know what? Those qualities are often sorely lacking. By romance, I mean just that little hopefulness. Oh, the hope. That little inner shimmy that you want to see someone undergoing, that you want to feel yourself. And for me, that does have everything to do with if you can know you're talking about relatability. There is a kind of fantasy and a romantic fantasy about who you could be, like playing yourself into the film that is almost more important than the romantic partner.

6:18And then the comedy element. Funny. It does have to be funny. And that can actually be a harder note to strike. Comedy is hard. Comedy is famously hard. Yeah. It's impossible. I just think and this is just straight up rudiments of storytelling. the reason the speech has to happen is that there has to be a moment when all seems impossible. I judge it by like how good is the moment when whatever it is, somebody's been caught lying, somebody's done some sort of betrayal where it's over. And I want to see them climb that hill back into plausibility. You love an obstacle. And it's weird because in other forms of storytelling, I kind of don't like that.

7:00I'm like not as invested in that kind of vertiginous plot, but in the rom-com, for some reason, I do like it. What's on the Mount Rushmore then? So like based on these criteria and many more, there are many more criteria that we could name. What then rises to the top? Well, this is not the first time that I've sung this tune on this show. Let the river run. There she goes. There she goes. She'll take any opportunity. Any opportunity. Working Girl, my friends. Mike Nichols' Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford, about a woman's search for love, but not just love. And the kind of tradition of like 1980s feminism, love and professional fulfillment.

7:50I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that? No. No. And it's a great example of a complete wish fulfillment movie where career does not negate love, but in fact complements it in an incredibly satisfying way. She can have it all. She can have it all. Exactly. And she can be it all. I mean, it's such a great movie and it is so fascinating because it has to do, I mean, I have a whole argument that I just can't wait to trot out at some point in this episode about the condition of women in the 20th century and how it directly tracks onto the rom-com. Another New York movie, New York is such a place in the rom-com world because of this kind of, I think, striving woman who we know me and I relate to.

8:42Surprise. You've Got Males, a perfect film. It's a perfect film. and its reception history, eyes were rolled, and now everyone is regretting those roles because... Because now we love Barnes & Noble. Because, first of all, Barnes & Noble, the enemy in that movie and the guise of Fox Books. Right. The megastore that's going to put out Barnes & Noble. Now it's like a mom-and-pop shop. My goodness. Barnes & Noble is our last hope. Like a little shoemaking atelier. Exactly. But more to the point. So You Got Meals is a perfect movie. It starts with the trope we were discussing in our Romanticy episode from a few months ago, Enemies to Lovers.

9:23And it's a clash all the way until some, okay, fairly questionable stuff involving manipulation, but like all for the good goes down and they befriend one another and accept life. But here's why I love this movie. I love this movie because of Meg Ryan, who is utterly pitch perfect as she's exactly the right degree of frazzled. Why did you stop by again? I forget. She's utterly functional and loving and adorable and wears her heart on her sleeve. But she also is like totally who she is in the way that she was in those like Nora Ephron movies, also in When Harry Met Sally and other total great. And so you're rooting for her.

10:01You're rooting for the good side of him that could potentially come out. And this is, of course, the other fantasy in romantic comedy. The man is transformed by his love of a good woman. Oh, yeah. Like, he is this, you know, little shriveled soul divorcee who just wants to make money and hang out on his houseboat in the Hudson River. Right. Who's transformed. I always go back and forth about my favorite rom-com. It's often Love and Basketball, Omar Epps, Sanaa Lathan. um so now lathan is also in another one of my favorite rom-coms which is it's it's a it's a hybrid comedy drama ensemble piece but romance is really at its core it's called the best man and essentially it's about a group of friends this for me is classic really it's about a wedding it's the lead up to the wedding of two of the friends and it is learned because one of the friends played by Taye Diggs is a writer and he has written a novel and it's found out by the character that's played by Morris Chestnut, who's getting married, that way back in college there was a betrayal.

11:18Me has slept with your best man.

11:23And what ensues is a drama of betrayal, including Taye Diggs potentially cheating on his girlfriend, played by Sanaa Lathan. That should never have happened to you. For me, The Best Man is the great text of a kind of Black, Gen X sensibility. They're kind of like, there's incense and people are playing the guitar. It's like sexy in a way that I wanted to be. It came out in 1999 and it's directed by Malcolm D. Lee, who has continued to create these movies. But for me, one of the good things about a rom-com is that it can introduce you to a whole milieu and a whole kind of social stratum to which you can sort of aspire to live in.

12:09Yeah, I mean, that makes me think of another point, Vincent, the idea of kind of aspirationality and when the rom-com catches you in your own life. Like, when are you watching this? Like, in my early teen years, you know, like, watching these classic rom-coms when I was myself on the verge of entering into the romance plot, right? Or, like, the sex plot, I guess. and having these movies transmit to me what to look for. Like, what are the values that I would myself want to adopt as, like, a person who is seeking her own love connection? That's right. I love that you're saying that because I do think that in some rom-coms, in some of the great ones, that issue is itself dramatized.

13:06What kind of life do I want to live? and your expectations around it or the fantasies around it being actually defied in favor of something that is not at all what you thought would be your ideal. And that is so fun to watch because the ideal rom-com is also a journey to self-knowledge. It's not just about your perfect wish fulfillment and you got exactly what you wanted. You have to learn something about yourself and have your expectations defied and come out realizing that you now know what love is because it caught you by surprise. That's where the magic is. And when there's chemistry between the leaves.

13:43Chemistry. So that you believe it. Yes. That's where the magic is. Yes. Yes. And I want to return once again to full penetration. Okay. Not because I actually think there should be full penetration. In the rom-com. Let's clarify. Let's clarify. It was a joke. But the belief in the possibility of sex, because actual sex, you know, the rom-com is historically not an explicit genre. There is a hint of forthcoming sex. There should be. In The Good Ones, there is attraction, you know, chemistry. The promise, the potential of sex needs to be there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I'm deep in the Nora Ephron thing, obviously.

14:30I know that's rather typical and not going to shock anyone. But When Harry Met Sally, of course, directed by Rob Reiner, but written by Nora Ephron, sex ruins everything briefly before everything is made right again. And that is also such a great part of that movie because that's also realistic. We're like, the wish fulfillment finally happens. And I just I will never forget that kind of like. I know when she wakes up. on Meg Ryan's face, which is so happy, and he's just like, I cannot get out of here fast enough. Brilliant, brilliant. You know, how are you going to work your way back from that?

15:02Let's get to that third act and find out. Let's find out. This summer, two projects are trying to take up the mantle of the modern rom-com. Materialists and Too Much. How do they succeed, or not, in updating the genre? That's in a minute on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

15:31You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

16:05Okay, now it's time to get contemporary. Let's turn to the 2025 hopeful entries into the rom-com canon. Do they make it in? Let's see. Let's start with Celine Song's Materialists. Would anyone like to offer us a synopsis? I can try. So in Materialist, we have Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson. She is a matchmaker. How many marriages are you responsible for now, Lucy? Nine. She knows exactly what makes a relationship potentially work. And what makes her so good at her job is that she is completely unsentimental. She sees marriage as a business proposition. It's math, as she says. When the movie opens, she is attending a wedding of one of her clients that she set up successfully.

17:02And two things happen in that wedding. First of all, she meets Harry, played by Pedro Pascal. You are what we call a unicorn, an impossible fantasy. He's incredibly wealthy. He's very handsome. He's tall. He's urbane. He's stylish. He appears at least kind. And he's single. At the same time as she's kind of flirting with Harry, she runs into John, her old boyfriend, played by Chris Evans, who she broke up with because he was broke. And so the movie is basically about this triangle. It's about Lucy trying to determine whether she should go with Harry, which according to her principles is the perfect match, or whether she should go back to John, who according to her principles is a complete dud.

17:57That is 100 percent. Correct. between the dashing, very eligible, viable Pedro Pascal and the dirtbag artist Chris Evans. Alex, did you like this movie? Oh my God, I have so much to say about this movie. Oh my God, I can't wait to hear Alex's take. I have a feeling I'm going to be right in between Nomi and Vincent. I'm guessing, don't tell me yet if I'm right, I'm guessing Vincent loved Nomi hated, and here I am, very confused in the middle. Okay. I'm seeing nods, so I think I'm on to something. Okay. I know my fellow critics. No, me. Don't feel slighted. Don't feel slandered. Not at all. I'm just going to say where I came out.

18:39No, I feel, in fact, seen and recognized. True. And that's love. And that is love. Good. But it's also hate. Well, it's my love for you. Yes. It's my hate for the material. Got it. No, no, no, no, no. It's not hate. I did not think it was a very good movie. I thought it was trying to do something interesting. And there were things about it that I liked. But I felt it was completely and I and I understand, I think that this was intentional in some ways. the soporific vibe of this movie the complete kind of evenness of it in terms of dialogue in terms of tonality uh in terms of the characters being indistinguishable from from each other in anything except obviously like appearance was trying i think to make a point about this kind of world that amounts to math, Dakota Johnson characters especially, she is unruffled, but unruffled to the extent where I was like, is she, has she taken like seven Xanax bars like before, you know, doing every scene that I was like, okay, I can see that this could be, yes, again, a comment on like, we're not talking about big emotion here.

20:06We're talking about calculation, right? We're talking about business. And so this is the way relationships between people are. She, you know, famously, and this has been talked about in stuff written about this movie, up front tells Harry, the Pedro Pascal character, when she first meets him, she's like, I make$80 ,000 a year. I know you make much more, basically. She comes to his beautiful Tribeca apartment the first time. She's like, how much is this place? He's like, it's$12 million, right? The problem for me was that this, the same kind of soporific like Xanax vibe continued like from start to finish for me.

20:47But then that seemed to me to be at odds with the kind of like central conflict the movie was trying to, the choice, which seemed the kind of the raison d 'etre of this movie. Alex, what do you think? Well, I had a splendid time seeing this movie by myself, the chair next to me, absolutely empty, laughing out loud, enjoying myself. Laughing out loud? I was laughing out loud because what I liked very much about it, especially in the first half of the movie, and what I found refreshing was that it foregrounded these materialistic aspects and made them the total focus and part of the comedy of the movie right up top.

21:29Like we were talking about Jane Austen a few weeks ago. This is a world in which everybody knows how much the eligible mate has per year. And the material conditions of what that marriage will look like are everything to determining whether there's compatibility. And though we like to think we've moved so far from this world and we like to flatter ourselves that we care about such different things, I don't think that's really so much the case. And this is a very, like, harsh light shown on that. There's a really fun opening where it begins with a caveman couple and a scene of courtship that is both ridiculous and somewhat touching and cuts to contemporary Manhattan where Dakota Johnson is click clacking around and her click clack heels.

22:12But, you know, what I like about it up front is you get these interviews between the Dakota Johnson character and her clients. And you see that all of them, first of all, have this desperation around them. And I found the frank acknowledgment that worth and the acknowledgement of worth is what people are looking for in the dating market to be funny and to feel true. I didn't, you know, is it cynical? It's absolutely cynical. But part of the promise of the movie is that it's going to break down that cynicism and get to the warmer crust underneath. So therefore you have the Chris Evans character.

22:45And what got me there was it is for Lucy this choice between the past and the future. Chris Evans' character is living, he's 37. He lives like he's 27. And I found that funny too. Like his horrible apartment with his gross roommates. You know, there's a wince of recognition from me. Like, if you're a woman, you've seen that apartment. Possibly if you're a man, it's not good. It's not a good feeling. And I found the truthfulness of that and the fact that she wouldn't want to go back there refreshing and I enjoyed it. And I also admit to being absolutely fascinated by the affectlessness of Dakota Johnson.

23:25Like, it's fascinating. It's fascinating, in part because I think in Dakota Johnson, you have a really capital A adult. She is living in her uncluttered apartment. She's making money for herself. She looks really great. She's focused on her endgame. She's adulting all the way. And that kind of character, I think, has actually fallen out a bit of the rom-com space and of... Someone who actually has it together? Yeah, someone who actually has it together. Then, of course, the problem becomes that there's nothing underneath. That you don't understand. You don't see what the Chris Evans character is seeing in her.

23:57And the movie doesn't try to make you see it either. It just relies on the idea that they had a past together. It relies on him declaring his feelings for her inexplicably. And while she treats him quite badly. The inexplicability. That's what I'm trying to say. So it did all fall apart, in my opinion. And my question for you guys and for the audience of this movie and for Celine Song is, is there no middle ground whence the grown up? Where's the grown up man option who isn't this like weird corporate I'm going to take you only to sushi restaurants person or an absolute mess who I'm sorry, I can't respect.

24:36Yeah. Well, I think part of that is like the description of Dakota Johnson's character that you offered at the beginning, which is she's the middle ground. She is neither of those things. One of my favorite things about this film, and this is one of the reasons that you're totally right in profiling me, I loved it, was in fact the performances. because Nomi's right. When we think about the rom-com, we do think about relatability. And with relatability comes naturalism in acting. And this movie's like, nope, these people don't act like people. And the dual meaning, it seems to me, of the title is like, yes, there's economic materialism, but there's also a kind of spiritual material.

25:19What if there's no great soul either? What if people aren't these bundle of wonderful qualities that are waiting to be awakened by love, right? The self-realization thing that you mentioned, Alex. What if that's not in play, actually? It seemed to me to be a counterfactual exercise. What if we just are an accrual? Like, yes, we have histories, but we're not some great thing beneath the surface. And so the awkwardness of all the performances to me seemed to be part of a kind of mission statement, which I admired the commitment to it all through the film. I don't really think that we're supposed to think that she and Chris Evans are really some great all compact like every single backstory shot is just of them.

26:04There's one where they get out of a car in the middle of what seems to be Times Square and they're just yelling at each other because of, you know, it's their anniversary and there's this shitty date and nothing that he does is good enough. He's not it's not like he's poor, but thoughtful. It's not like he's poor, but particularly funny. Yeah. He's kind of nice to her, but that's it. He's just poor. Yeah, he's just poor. Come on, you guys. He's a handsome guy. And not even poor. He's a hot man. He's a hot man. And so, by the way, it's Pedro Pascal. And then there was a great big joke in the middle of the movie.

26:37I won't let it go, but he has done things to sort of enhance his viability, which calls into question even his sort of dashing exterior. But one thing I do want to highlight is that we won't spoil it, but there is like somewhere in the middle of this movie, we are reminded that beneath all dating is also the like the specter of violence. Right. And so, yeah, this hope, this aspiration is a great big risk that why are we taking it? It really does call the whole enterprise into question in a way that, again, I thought was brave. but also made me think maybe it's not a romantic comedy. It seemed to me to be just like a romantic thriller or horror movie that was marketed in this way because it wants to subvert a thing.