After delivering one of the single best love films of the last decade (Past Lives), expectations are high for Celine Song‘s sophomore directorial effort.
Impossibly high it turns out, given the marketing approach the A24 team have adopted. Materialists is being sold as a convention rom-com about a matchmaker, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) caught between a rich new suitor (Pedro Pascal‘s Harry) and a poor old flame (Chris Evans‘ John).
While the film eventually finds itself in traditional will-they, won’t-they territory, the reality is that it is far more complicated than conventional romantic fare.
For starters, Lucy is actively unlikeable. Not in an anti-heroine kind of way; more in a self-reflexive, “tells the other characters in the film” kind of way. Lucy actively tells John on two separate occasions that she’s not a good person; that it makes her feel bad; but that she can’t help the way she is.
To the audience, she’s not nearly so bad. As played by Johnson, Lucy seems confident, breezy, and protective of her heart. She deliberately isolates herself from affairs of the heart (and possibly even conventional friendship considering she appears to have none in the film).
Instead Lucy pours herself into her work: matchmaking. Materialists is filled with montages of Lucy taking notes at meetings with clients who have outrageous expectations about potential life partners. The word “cynical” is being tossed around in reviews and the statement is appropriate: Materialists earns its title for the way its characters approach love and marriage as a transaction. Matches are not based on affection; they’re laid out on the basis of attractiveness, income, height, political sensibility, and upbringing.
“Love is easy; dating is risky” Lucy is fond of telling her (often female) clients as she floats from parties to lunches, espousing the compatibility of one person to another. She’s calm, reassuring, and complimentary about all of them, even when their demands, principally involving height and a full head of hair (for women) or looks and youth (for men), are shallow and short-sighted.
But Lucy knows how to play this game, and she’s good at her job. Early in the film, the matchmaking company she works for fêtes her for locking down her seventh engagement.
It’s at that couple’s wedding that Lucy meets Harry, an easy-going, slightly cavalier rogue who casually tosses away another person’s name card to sit next to Lucy. He chats her up, determined to secure a date, but Lucy’s attention is distracted when she spots her ex of five years: John, a poor, aspiring actor who still lives with two roommates and has a car he can barely afford to drive.
There are a few flashbacks to Lucy and John’s relationship (Song wisely keeps these brief and to the point) and it’s clear that the two were a great match…aside from the financials. Sporting perfectly tousled bed head and that winsome smile that made him Captain America, Evans is the clear “right partner” for Lucy, despite her protests that the only quality influencing her decision to date/marry is money.
Importantly, where there’s an undeniable visual chemistry in Lucy’s scenes with Harry, there’s almost no sexual chemistry. By comparison, there’s a lived-in comfort in the moments between Lucy and John.
So far, so conventional, right? That appears to be the case until the mid-way point of the film when an incident involving her favourite client, Sophie (Zoë Winters) upsets Lucy’s perfect bubble. Suddenly all of the talk of matches, the realities of the dating scene, and her confidence in negotiating the two, dissipates. Lucy’s boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), reassures her that she just needs some time, but the illusion is broken, leaving the young professional unmoored and adrift for the back half of the film.
Where Past Lives was achingly romantic and tragic, Materialists is something completely different. It begins as something conventional, then becomes something inherently more dark and confronting. The turning point results in a more complicated, and therefore interesting film, but the transition in and out of the crisis is a challenging emotional rollercoaster for viewers.
Lucy holds both her suitors and the audience at arm’s length, even when things are going according to plan (this is a testament to Johnson, whose performance suggests that Lucy’s charm, wit, and glamor are merely armor against romantic harm). Song’s screenplay adopts the same approach: the film deliberately plays into the tropes of romance movies to lull its audience into a false sense of security before pulling out the rug from under us.
Song has crafted a resistant romance, but in the process of disassembling and repairing Lucy’s (love) life, Materialists introduces a bitterness that it never quite loses. Is this true to life and the realities of dating and relationships? Undoubtedly so (more than we would probably care to admit). As entertainment, however, it’s a hard sell for audiences who can’t negotiate the changes in tone and manage their expectations as required.
Materialists is more interesting because of Song’s resistance to romantic tropes, but this ain’t no crowd-pleaser (even if it is being sold as one). 3/5
Materialists is in theaters June 13
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