Have you ever looked at one of the great love triangle rom-coms of yore and asked yourself the question, what if someone did this story—literally, this exact same story—only without the romance or the comedy?
It doesn’t matter what your answer is. The point is that Celine Song answered yes, apparently, because she proceeded to not just write Materialists but also direct it as well, so now we all get to experience the answer to this question no one else asked.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a 30-something matchmaker living her best single-by-choice life in NYC and crushing it. She’s the top performer at Adore, the elite matchmaking service where she works attempting to pair off high net-worth singles. She turns heads striding down the streets of Manhattan in perfectly styled designer business casual wear, but rarely spares a glance in return. Her sights are set far higher than her fellow pedestrians—she’s going to marry the next man she dates, and her one non-negotiable is that her Prince Charming be filthy rich. She doesn’t come from money, and she’s determined not to end up like her parents, fighting over $20.
Working the room at a client’s wedding for all it’s worth, stack of business cards at the ready, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the groom’s bachelor brother and the kind of man people in her business refer to as a “Unicorn”: tall, rich, charming, handsome, and somehow still single. She pursues him on behalf of her clients, but Harry is only interested in Lucy herself—and he’s not the only one. The wedding also reconnects Lucy with her ex John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor working the event as a cater-waiter. The history between them is clear, as are the unresolved feelings: John still has her drink order memorized, while Lucy can’t help but duck out of the festivities to seek John out by the loading docks.
The ghost of financial insecurity looms so large over Lucy that it’s palpable in most scenes she’s in. In conversations with co-workers, the way she flirts, the way she sees the world and moves within it. And there is something refreshing to this—or there could be, if the film fully committed to the idea and executed it effectively. Sadly, it doesn’t. Materialists still indulges in all the fantastical liberties of a traditional rom-com when it suits. Lucy says her salary is $80K and she has no inherited wealth, but also lives in a cute apartment by herself in Manhattan and is consistently decked out in luxury fashion. That is simply not how NYC works, no matter how good you are at bargain hunting. The film’s rather superficial notions of financial insecurity’s impact on the psyche are made fully blatant by the end, as Lucy makes a series of decisions that would be utterly unthinkable to the character the film previously established—and the most baffling of which actually has nothing to do with her love life.
Other rom-coms are unabashedly aspirational; it doesn’t matter that everyone somehow works in publishing and lives like a millionaire, it’s all part of the fantasy. It’s the combination of claiming to be something different but then ultimately doing the same thing that causes Materialists problems.
There is space in the world for hyper-realistic stories about romance and relationships. But that’s not really what Materialists is, by the end. It’s marketed as a romantic comedy, introduces itself as a clinical, almost brutal subversion of rom-com expectations, then has a quiet identity crisis throughout the second act and doubles back to a rom-com standard ending that now makes no sense due to the the precedent established earlier in the film.
As a storyteller, Celine Song has interesting ideas and a distinctive voice, which certainly counts for something. There’s an obliqueness to how she writes that is not without its admirers or its merits, particularly in terms of giving great actors space to really flesh out their characters themselves. She writes the kind of roles that can truly showcase the talents of the best of the best, but can also highlight the shortcomings of anyone not in that top 0.1%. Materialists is a stellar package, and the trifecta of Pedro Pascal, Dakota Johnson, and Chris Evans is star power to the max. Unfortunately, Johnson in particular, despite her solid chemistry with both her co-stars, ultimately feels rather miscast. To be fair, there’s too much of Lucy’s character, and particularly the significant shift in thinking she undergoes, that’s left almost entirely to subtext for any actor to fully compensate for what’s missing on the page. Johnson is also stuck with what is on the page, and there are some real clunkers here, like the genuinely unintelligible, “I could never be an actor. I don’t know how to stand, or speak.” (What does it even mean?) But beyond that, Johnson’s tendency towards a flatter affect really does not help things here.
Song has a minimalist approach to filmmaking. Scenes tend to be relatively contained and straightforward. The pacing is slow, with the kinds of lingering pauses left in to be interpreted that other films would simply cut out. The comedy, to use that term generously, is often so subtle it’s unclear if the “joke” is meant to be funny or if it’s actually a sincere point landing awkwardly.
One of the key difficulties with such a restrained approach is that little flaws that might be easy to look past in different circumstances become painfully blatant. Every crack or wrinkle shows, and while it feels overly harsh to call Materialists a full-blown sophomore slump following Past Lives, there is a moderate case of that particular affliction here. The result is a film that, while not without merits, feels fundamentally in conflict with itself, equally unsatisfying to both those who love rom-coms and those who resent the typical contrivances of the genre.
Materialists is now playing in theaters.
