“Dating is a risk,” declares Lucy (Dakota Johnson). Luckily for her clients, she specializes in risk management. For a fee, this modern-day matchmaker will set you up with your ideal soulmate — tall, petite, male, female, fit, very fit, rich, very rich. Her apartment may be modest, her outfits chic but not showy, her salary under six figures. But given that she’s just brokered her ninth marriage for the professional-love-connection firm Adore, Lucy is the clearly the company’s undisputed all-star. Whether the idea of functioning as a human Tinder for uppercrust lonelyhearts is, as one of the rare dissatisfied customers says, a “scam” is totally beside the point. Lucy is simply fulfilling a need. “When [someone] asks for a six foot tall drink of water with a crazy huge salary and a full head of hair,” she tells her colleagues, “you deliver.”
Welcome to the world of Materialists, writer-director Celine Song‘s take on the Romance Industrial Complex. Having pivoted from playwright to filmmaker via 2023’s Past Lives, the Oscar nominee suddenly found herself having to follow up one of the single most impressive debut movies of the past 50 years. Rather than trying to match that film’s tender glances at the roads not traveled, Song has opted instead for a penetrating side eye at those who find market value in matters of the heart. It’s still more of a swipe-right glimpse into the matchmaking game than a semi-righteous satire; having briefly worked at a similar firm in her early days in New York, she’s not interested in passing judgement. Song’s merely offering a peek behind the curtain. What do people really want in a life partner? And how does looking for love affect someone’s idea of intimacy when it’s reduced to a transaction?
For Lucy, the entire notion of finding the perfect lid for every pot is nothing personal. It’s strictly business, and every person she sees walking down the street or lounging at a wedding reception’s bar is simply a potential client. In fact, that’s how she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal, at his most matinee-idol dapper). His brother is getting married, courtesy of Lucy’s matchmaking skills. Harry is a more tasteful, refined version of a Wall Street finance dude; add in the fact that he’s also handsome and single, and you’ve got a Grade-A “unicorn” in Lucy’s eyes. She sees him as a future success story for the service. He wants to date her. Lucy is intrigued enough to stick around for a drink — “a beer and Coke.” No sooner has she uttered the words than a beer and a Coke is put down in front of her. We’re led to think Harry is the sort of Prince Charming that can grant wishes instantly on demand.
Except he’s not the one anticipating Lucy’s odd, unique beverage needs. That honor belongs to John (Chris Evans), a cater waiter working the ceremony. He’s also Lucy’s ex, from back in the days when they were both struggling actors. John is still trying to chase the dream, doing the occasional Off-Off-Broadway play, living in rent-controlled boho squalor and taking gig-economy jobs like this one. She has, obviously, moved on. Neither has forgotten their old arguments over money. But you can tell that they miss each other. It’s also evident that there’s something genuinely brewing between Lucy and Harry as well. Soon, we’ve got something close to a good old-fashioned love triangle on our hands.
On the surface, Materialists resembles the types of movies that were once a key part of a well-balanced cinematic diet (some called them “rom-coms”), even as its seems to be setting up the genre for a proper skewering. Romantic comedies, after all, have shaped several generations’ view of how meet-cutes lead to happily ever afters, with marriage being the holy grail awaiting the winners. For Lucy, it’s also the ultimate end game — but for entirely different reasons. She’s selling true love, the long-game kind that nabs you “nursing-home partners” and “grave buddies,” by crunching stats and doing the math. Mates are assessed by ideal height, attractiveness, and financial status. A surgery that can add six inches to one’s height “can double a man’s value.” In the film’s best scene, Lucy and Harry sit across from each other at a swank restaurant, negotiating their transition into something more serious. He likes her “intangible assets” and the fact that she understands how the world works. She likes how he casually picks up a check. Let’s make a deal. We’ve seen movies in which business talk is double-entendred into being sexy. This may be the first film in which mutual attraction is commodified by cold, hard business talk.
It’s one of several standout sequences in which Materialists reminds you that Song’s past as a playwright has greatly benefited her present occupation, and that her ability to write dialogue that creatively crackles, yet still serves the characters speaking it, is a key component to her work. With Lucy, she’s also gifted Johnson with a role that plays to the actor’s strengths. Make that her strengths and her limitations — the star has been knocked for the occasional deadpan line readings that risk simply being dead-on-arrival. Some filmmakers, notably Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, Suspiria) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter), have figured out how to use Johnson’s affectless, blasé cadences to their mutual advantage. So has Song. There’s almost a built-in level of irony and cut-the-crap knowingness to the way Lucy talks about love, and Johnson gives her hero a jadedness that somehow stops short of being caustic or overly cynical. It’s not that Lucy doesn’t believe in love. She simply, not to mention literally, can’t afford to. Lucy’s a material girl, living in a material world. Who has time for fairy-tale ideas of romance when you’re dealing with recession-era realities and making sure the rent’s paid?
Throw in Pascal’s mix of entitlement, gentlemanliness and practicality next to Johnson’s guarded and grounded performance, and you have Materialists working on all cylinders — a truly singular spin on the economics of two hearts beating as one shared bank account. Which may be why, when their dynamic recedes into the background and the focus swings more to Lucy and John, a.k.a. the poor but honorable guy that got away, the movie begins to falter and wobble. The last act, which hinges on Lucy’s self-loathing, John’s inherent decency and a subplot involving a client (Succession‘s Zoë Winters) whose “dream” date turns into a nightmare, feels several beats out of sync with what precedes it. Lots of films hinge on an equation balancing a moving on from disillusionment and a hard-won sense of hope, but to quote one of Lucy’s favorite phrases, the math just doesn’t add up here. “I’m trying to settle!” cries one of Lucy’s longtime prospects early on, and you almost feel like the movie eventually adopts that zinger as a mantra of its own.
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Yet there’s so much to love — truly love, nursing-home partner love, grave-buddy love — about Materialists, which may be why the last-minute left turn towards uplift feels like a letdown. Song can turn a cryptic cold-opening involving cavemen in love into the set-up for a sublime climactic payoff, and she nails the hell that is a thirtysomething artistic life involving dingy flats and douchebag roommates. A series of montages involving people laying out their outsized standards for a soulmate, including one 47-year-old gentleman who’s sick of dating 21-year-olds and needs someone older, smarter, wiser — “closer to, you know, 27, 28… 29 is kind of pushing it” — double as wry anthropology lessons. Having given us a punch-drunk vision of romantic dilemmas in her masterpiece of a debut, Song now delivers a more practical, hangover-adjacent look at how the human need for relationships gets turned into a bespoke luxury item. The amount of big swings and sheer talent on display here as she tries to chart the intersection between a coup de coeur and capitalism is still enough to make you swoon.
From Rolling Stone US
