Materialists stars Dakota Johnson, left, as a high-end matchmaker in a love triangle between two men, played by Pedro Pascal (right) and Chris Evans.The Associated Press
Materialists
Written and directed by Celine Song
Starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal
Classification 14A; 117 minutes
Opens in theatres June 13
It is easy to lament the loss of the mid-budget rom-com, a fixture of the aughts that reliably performed well at the box office before being capsized by costly, flavourless franchises. The formula abided: a woman flits around a metropolis (usually New York or a cost-effective stand-in), discontented in some way with her career or relationships, until a romantic encounter shakes up her routine. It’s unrealistic by design – and perpetually exclusionary – but the escapist impulse to watch someone in love redecorate their life throbs on.
Materialists, Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives, arrives assuredly with all of the trimmings and none of the payoff – like a romcom with the “com” airlifted out of it.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a stylishly detached matchmaker at a dating agency in Manhattan, commended for her “razor-sharp instincts and eye for chemistry,” and responsible for a whopping nine marriages. Part therapist, part handler, Lucy spends her days in cafés and bistros with eligible singles, jotting down their most outlandish criteria for a partner.
Materialists director Celine Song on the ‘ancient miracle of love’ at the heart of her new film
She assumes the language of marketplace economics; her job, as we are repeatedly told, is plugging values into an endless equation. Of course, she is perpetually single, affectionately teased by her co-workers for being “voluntarily celibate.” (Incel dialect lines the film as both an impossible hurdle in modern dating and a rebuff against rom-com idealism.)
At a client’s wedding, in the span of a few minutes, Lucy encounters both Harry (Pedro Pascal), a kind-eyed, enchantingly rich bachelor (termed a “unicorn” in her biz) and her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a scruffy theatre actor and cater-waiter with whom she split over financial issues. Though she begins dating Harry, who signs cheques with abandon and gifts her elephantine bouquets of peonies, there is a want of familiarity that entices her to attend John’s latest play.
The premise rhymes with Past Lives, also a prestige romantic dramedy about a love triangle between a South Korean emigrée, her childhood sweetheart and her American husband. (Song shares this three-way writing trait with her own husband Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote the screenplays for 2024’s Challengers and Queer.) Where Song’s debut was selectively sympathetic, Materialists feels totally bereft of warmth.
The alchemy isn’t at all right between Johnson, Evans and Pascal; the three actors deliver their lines in a wooden, laboured manner far outstripped by the chewy tension of Past Lives’s throuple. The two men work only as juxtaposing forces: where Harry lives in a high-ceilinged, $12-million penthouse, John cannot leave his bedroom without slipping on a roommate’s used condom. Amusingly, the latter’s apartment is shot handheld, wobbly and stressful to behold. The rest of the film’s Architectural Digest-congruent visuals, shot by Shabier Kirchner, are elegantly vapid: height instead of grandeur, harmony instead of depth.
Evans plays the scruffy ex-boyfriend who draws Lucy in despite her new relationship.The Associated Press
Seemingly a renaissance of Nora Ephron proportions – the trailers cheekily employed nineties-style narration – Materialists feels fussily averse to the genre, unable to suspend disbelief long enough before passing into bleak and upsetting territory. “We’re not just showing up here to be in love and beautiful,” Song told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re also going to take this opportunity to talk about something.”
Midway through the film, Lucy discovers one of her clients was assaulted on a date she arranged. There is no protection for this woman, Sophie (Zoe Winters), who is taking legal action against the agency, where such encounters are an apparent “risk” as per Lucy’s boss. By this point, the film is airless in the name of self-awareness, unable to resume any momentum, and Lucy has still yet to pick her match.
In 2020, Emerald Fennell received considerable backlash for her directorial debut Promising Young Woman. Marketed as a rape-revenge thriller, the second act contorted into further tragedy and subjugation for its female protagonist, to the horror of many viewers expecting a cathartic payoff. Similarly, the promotional scheme for Materialists not only buries the subject of assault entirely, but plays into nostalgic romcom tropes that invite a certain breezy viewership.
What does it mean to “talk about” sexual assault in a film which treats it as an ancillary plot twist to enlighten one woman’s love life? Lucy pursues a redemption arc that is difficult to watch, throwing a tonal wrench into the sensitive mechanics of the plot. Perhaps the most upsetting detail is that Sophie casually returns to the same dating agency in the end, ready to find the man of her dreams.
Materialists is not about anything new. In the rom-coms of yore, characters are compassed by their hearts and troubled by their material circumstances. Money, gender, authority, safety and value systems have always played into these films, whether or not this is bull-horned to the audience.
Materialists is, at best, genre confused and, at worst, negligent to its own ideological position – a stiff, reluctant rom-com that cannot square the footloose idealism of its predecessors with the terrifying realities of today’s dating pool.
