At the wedding of one of her clients, matchmaker Lucy knows just what to ask when the bride-to-be becomes paralyzed by trepidation. Played with a chilly, unaffected air by Dakota Johnson in writer-director Celine Song’s second film, Materialists, Lucy is a practical-minded “eternal bachelorette,” here to mark another of her matches as successful as they enter the pearly gates of heteronormativity: marriage. Still, Lucy’s client momentarily goes teary and needs convincing to go forward with it. Lucy asks how this man makes her client feel. “It makes me feel I won,” the client says with makeup-smeared glee, remembering that her fiancé makes her sister jealous when compared to her husband. She decides to go through with it. It’s the film’s way of quickly introducing the brazen calculations of power that go into every match, in which “love” is in actuality a simulacrum of duty and aesthetic matching that define Song’s outlook on the misguided nature of modern romance.
Materialists isn’t the revelatory, thinking woman’s rom-com that Song and A24’s marketing department have promised it is. While the director has namechecked films like Broadcast News (1987) and The Apartment (1960), she seemingly forgets a key component of each: They’re actually funny, and brimming with the tender considerations of what happens when actualized people crash into each other, professionally and romantically and emotionally. Materialists takes the barest skin of the rom-com genre’s trappings — crisp interiors, airy cinematography, warm and bright color grading, aspirational jobs, the click of heels on pavement (the auditory signal of a determined girl boss) — and uses them for a story of little feeling. It glances at the structural issues warping heterosexual love, only to argue on behalf of the dishonest cliché that love is always enough if you choose for it to be, powerful enough even to overcome the pesky matters of class strife and misogyny. And while the press tour for the film has highlighted the rapport between its attractive and game stars, that doesn’t reflect the chemistry between them onscreen. There isn’t a flicker of heat between any of them. But the bigger issue is that each character is more of a threadbare idea improperly stitched together than a person.
Song’s debut as a filmmaker, Past Lives, was a thinly drawn effort to capture the nostalgia and longing of a love that could have been. Its placid visual grammar ultimately lacked feeling and specificity, but at least it was aiming to capture something meaningfully rooted in Song’s life experiences. Like that film, Materialists sets up a love triangle for its heroine, this time in service of a more facile idea. The first suitor we meet is Harry, an exceedingly wealthy romantic fantasy of a person, played with even-keeled charm by Pedro Pascal. What Harry wants beyond a partner is unclear. What is evident is his interest in Lucy at that wedding, where his brother is the groom. She’s more keen to take him on as a client, however, and makes tepid quips in response to his flirtations. “I know about dating,” she tells him. Dating may be difficult, she says, but “love is easy.” A complication arises in the form of Lucy’s former paramour, a failing theater actor named John (Chris Evans), who is working with the catering company at the wedding. In a flashback and through labored dialogue, we learn that their relationship fell apart over money. He has none. She grew up in a house where money was a constant source of stress, making it a nonnegotiable for her in a relationship.
Lucy’s dilemma — choosing between Harry and John — rests on a single question: Will you treat a romantic union as a business deal or as an emotional affair? But the film doesn’t invest enough in exploring Harry and Lucy’s dynamic to determine whether their relationship would amount to a financial pact or not. Harry is rich, kind, and that’s pretty much it. They’re a love story in montage. Composed still lifes of finished breakfast on fine plates and clothes strewn about in his sleek Tribeca penthouse are the material substitute for any emotional understanding. Was most of Pascal’s performance left on the cutting-room floor? The bond between Lucy and John fares worse. The script doesn’t make the case for why Lucy goes back to him when all we’ve seen of their past is marked by resentment. There is no understanding of how they functioned as a couple beyond squabbles about money and no sense that they’ll do anything different in the future if reunited. How have they changed? What does their ideal partnership look like? Evans’s eyes go sherbert soft when he looks at her, and Johnson smiles coyly at him, but that can’t power a bond meant to withstand the pressures of capitalism on romance.
Song’s script clearly wants to frame Lucy as a scrappy everywoman, the kind of dame who is pragmatic in all areas of her life. Dakota Johnson is more charming than usual here but moves like someone whose feet have never touched the ground, who has never winced looking at a bill. (The only time I somewhat bought her performance is when Lucy’s disgust at the idea of being broke rises to the surface during an argument with John.) She smokes cigarettes with cool indifference, toying with them like an extension of her wardrobe — crisp blouses, slinking dresses of blush and turquoise, a gracefully limited palette. Pascal, too, is charming and easy-going. But he doesn’t sell desire, which is crucial to the fantasy his character is primed to represent. Some swooning is required. Watching the film, I wondered if the pipeline to become a leading man actually suited Pascal at all, as it calls for a kind of masculinity that is limiting and boring for an actor who playfully disrupts those norms on the red carpet. Meanwhile, Chris Evans can’t embody the role of the underdog who is meant to function as an emotional anchor for Lucy. The film suggests that John is the more honest and holistic choice, in part because of his class status. But the broke sensitive guy can do you just as dirty as a rich man; I have witnessed how bitterness can set in when a woman is the breadwinner in a heterosexual relationship. Presenting John as the more truthful, emotionally attuned option who will care for Lucy in ways a man like Harry wouldn’t is as much a delusion as anything else in the film.
Lucy has no personal life, no friends, no sense of self beyond what is absolutely necessary for the plot, and no history beyond vague allusions to a troubled childhood. Her career as a matchmaker is the only lens through which to understand her. In tightly framed shots, Lucy’s clients look directly at the camera as they rattle off their desires for a partner. These rapid-fire missives are meant to be a biting taxonomy of the way modern dating has been gamified. Lucy’s male clients need to have women exceedingly younger than them, that are perfectly fit, and endlessly pliable. (“Thirty-nine is 40,” one man says. “Nothing over a 20 BMI.”) The female clients need a man to have a certain height and level of wealth, though even the movie concedes that some of these women will “settle” and throw aside certain aesthetic and material wants. (“He’s balding; how dare he?” “How tall?”) These scenes render heterosexual desire as a shallow, diseased endeavor. The false equivocation of men’s and women’s superficial concerns is the first time Song tips her hand. She has no embodied understanding of how uniquely dehumanizing modern dating can be for women.
The film devolves into vacuity as it tries to provide answers about how class shapes romantic possibilities, heterosexual strife, and, most crucially, the sexual assault of a long-held client, Sophie (Zoë Winters), previously described as having “no specialty” in the marketplace of modern desire. This final plot turn is only in service of reshaping Lucy’s sense of herself and her career. Sophie’s sexual assault, her efforts toward justice, and her momentary anger at Lucy for putting her in a situation with a man who should have been vetted further become gristle for Lucy’s moral and emotional awakening. It softens the edges that made her successful and calculated in her work, and it contributes to her growing disinterest in being a matchmaker who chirps about “the marketplace” of dating and the “mathematics” of a good match, priming her to choose John over Harry.
In other words, she chooses “love.” At least Song’s treacly, textureless vision of it. In doing so, Lucy, and the film, fail to fully invest in its richest potential line of inquiry — the ways in which capitalism distorts modern romance — and pivots to a more conventional romantic narrative of the kind it had promised to upend, if not outright critique. Love is not all you need, even if it comes in the form of a man who looks like Chris Evans. Pretending otherwise isn’t merely dishonest. It’s a grift.