It’s a scene straight out of every frothy romantic comedy you’ve seen before: attractive and successful New York City matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson) glides into a party thrown for her by her work colleagues. It’s a swanky get-together, replete with balloons and cake and bubbly, celebrating the impending ninth marriage of a couple Lucy introduced. And yet, it’s sandwiched between two scenes that completely subvert the romantic fantasy that the style of writer and director Celine Song’s sophomore feature, Materialists, points to. Prior to the party, Lucy has a phone call with a man she set up for one of her clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters). He’s unsatisfied with her service; Sophie isn’t successful enough, or attractive enough, and at 39, she’s older than what he’s looking for. At a lunch date afterward, Lucy has to break the news to Sophie, who’s initially effusive about how well she believes their date went. This isn’t the first time this has happened— Sophie’s face falls, her voice cracks, and she eventually chokes out, “I’m trying to settle.” Sometime later, at her client’s wedding, Lucy is ushered into a bedroom by a frantic bundle of bridesmaids, where the bride-to-be lies prone on the bed, mascara smeared across her cheek, her white gown spread around her. Lucy calmly extracts the real reason why this woman wants to marry her fiancé: he makes her sister, who believes her husband isn’t as good as he is, jealous. Lucy affirms that this man makes her feel valuable, but if love enters into that equation, it isn’t voiced here.
Materialists pitches itself as an old-school rom-com about a woman caught between two men: Harry (Pedro Pascal), the wildly rich, charming, and hot brother of aforementioned fiancé Lucy meets at the wedding, and her ex John (Chris Evans), a broke actor who works catering at that wedding to help pay the bills, also charming, also hot. But anyone who’s seen Past Lives, Song’s acclaimed drama that similarly dons the wrapper of a romantic drama but is actually about opening the doors to other paths your life could have taken, ought not be surprised that Materialists is far messier and darker than that. Here, Song tackles the transactional nature of relationships in a world where dating apps allow people to easily parse through a set list of qualities they desire in a mate, passing judgment solely on how appealing they appear on paper, and where sometimes, a match based on similar upbringing, income, and level of attractiveness just makes business sense— even if there’s little to no real passion there. That’s essentially how Lucy approaches her job at Adore, a boutique firm whose clientele largely consists of upper-class Manhattan singles. They come to her with wildly unreasonable expectations: for age (a 48-year-old businessman whose previous few relationships were with women in their early twenties wants someone who’s more mature, but not too mature, because women in their thirties are too complicated), income, ethnicity, political leanings, and height (something a lot of men fudge an inch or two on paper, apparently). And Lucy smiles and nods and promises them that they’ll marry the love of their life.
But does Lucy herself believe in love? When talking to Harry after they first meet at the wedding, she compares her job to something as clinical as working in a morgue, or at an insurance agency. It’s all based on math: she carries a notebook where she jots down every fact about every one of her client’s physical attributes, education, and job history, pairing them together not so much based on their personalities, but how well they mesh on paper. That’s why when Harry wants to take her out, Lucy insists that he doesn’t actually want to date her, for the simple reason that she, with her meager salary ($80,000, before taxes), a ticking biological clock, and looks that will crack in ten years time (as a woman in her mid-thirties, I take umbrage at seeing women in their mid-thirties behaving as if they are knocking on death’s door, but I’ll look past it here) is not good enough for a finance bro with a $12 million penthouse apartment. And that’s why she broke up with John, despite them being together for years; they both may hail from poor families (a background that even after schmoozing with the rich for so long, Lucy can’t seem to shake; when Harry offers her a drink at the wedding, she asks for a Coke and beer), but she reached a point where, practically, she couldn’t justify not having money just to be with him.
Johnson accomplishes some truly nice character work with her performance here, transitioning easily from confident to broken, from the smart act she puts on in front of current and potential clients to the unguarded honesty that unspools from her when she’s with John, and her professional persona falls away. It’s the question of just who that character is, however, that Materialists gets hung up on, its surface-level pleasures— an appealing cast, a banging indie soundtrack that works in tandem with Daniel Pemberton’s score, and Shabier Kirchner’s glowing cinematography, which appropriately switches from polished long-shots as Lucy gazes awe-struck at Harry’s sprawling apartment to a hand-held camera that chaotically swerves around the tight spaces of the dingy place John shares with his sloppy roommates— just masking characterizations that fall apart the longer you hold them in your hand. Song has a lot of ideas about relationships, many of them achingly real, but her characters serve as little more than mouthpieces to express them. It’s an issue that Past Lives also possessed, but that’s all the more trenchant here. The men in Lucy’s life are boiled down to the ideas each represents: Harry’s views of marriage as a business transaction aline with Lucy’s; he believes they are a good match. On the flip side, John is a romantic who doesn’t believe anyone needs a concrete reason to love somebody— they just do. And we know, for instance, that Lucy used to be an actor before she became a matchmaker, that she is, in her words, “voluntarily celibate,” and that the next person she dates will be the person she marries. But the film fails to excavate any sense of her interior life beyond a couple of facts and the muddled perspective of love she exhibits, her belief in a real romance based purely on emotion restrained by practicality and materialism. It makes the film’s third-act swerve toward a more traditional, optimistic finale feel all the more unearned, particularly given the upsetting, dark corners the script peers into.
Song’s attention to detail is precise. Everything has a pay-off, whether it’s a one-off line of dialogue about a bizarre cosmetic surgery, or the film’s unexpected opening scene, which depicts two cave people engaged in what may be the first marriage proposal, the man twisting a wildflower stem into a ring and sliding it onto his partner’s dirt-crusted finger, a shot that’s mirrored later in the film. Her writing is sharp, alternately funny and piercing and often both at once. But— much like dating— it’s difficult to invest in people who don’t seem real, and whose penchant for spouting pithy dialogue is a poor substitute for a dose of deeply felt humanity. That’s something that even the most wildly dreamlike romantic comedies possess that make them so rewatchable, and something that even Song’s infinitely more realistic Materialists could have benefited from.
Materialists is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 116 minutes. Rated R.
Katie at the Movies 