Materialists
How far gone are you, how much has capitalism taken from you that when a movie so masterfully guides you to see that we shouldn’t cling to our materialism no matter how self-aware you think you are, you still leave the film as materialistic as you walked into it. The general public reaction to the film just speaks even more to the devastating state of society.
Everyone is aware of the materialism plaguing romantic relationships, but so few believe there’s room for love, so i guess it’s no surprise that so few understood and connected with the film. Harry only ever wanted to be with Lucy because she saw the truth of the world, and understood it. It’s the same self-awareness that the audience thinks makes them too intelligent and mature to choose love. You are not special, you don’t have the hidden secret that makes you too good for the movie, the movie sees you, the movie is FOR YOU.
It’s the point of if it all, the movie never hid what it was. It’s so painfully tragic and irritating that people are so misguided with their expectations and interpretations of the film. How pathetically irrelevant that you deprive yourself of experiencing a deeply honest movie because you wanted a romcom as shallow as your one line reviews.
The reality of romances is that we know we are materialistic and we know that people settle and that love is hard. Of course you’ve heard it all before, you’ve experienced it all before, and yet we all are still so lost in our lives. If we all have the answers, how are we still lost? That’s why the movie is profound, not because it invented something new about love. Love is as it always has been, and we are all still lonely. And the movie shows you that no matter how self-aware you are, and despite being in a world where it’s just even harder to find, we have to still want it, love has to be on the table. You’ll feel stupid and pathetic for it, but you have to still want it and hope it’s there for you.
I wish I had a musical degree to articulate the brilliant compositions of the film. However, as a testament to how good the score was, even without musical literacy I can recognize specific moment, where some of the most beautiful pieces I’ve ever heard so perfectly complemented the movie.
When The Places You Take Me To first plays during Harry and Lucy’s date, you experience an emotion that you recognize as intimate and precious, it’s the connection of true understanding between two characters. But you know it’s not love, because you can feel it’s not, and then Lucy tells you it’s not because she describes herself feeling “valuable”, a word that she used not long ago for a client as a manipulation of validating shallow emotions. So even during the most intimate moment between Harry and Lucy, the movie directly tells you that it’s not real and is transactional.
In contrast, the two songs near the end Why Does Anybody Get Married and Deal you recognize notes from The Places You Take Me To, but they’re a little different. The first sounds like a slightly more hopeful answer, but when you hear Deal you recognize the love. It’s almost a reprise, but this time the score does not feel incomplete with shorter notes. You’re not lost.