PLOT: A professional matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) finds herself at odds with her own materialism when, while dating a rich, handsome man (Pedro Pascal), her ex (Chris Evans) re-enters her life.
REVIEW: A24 have been – perhaps mistakenly – trying to market Celine Song’s Materialists as a throwback romantic comedy. What they haven’t revealed is that despite the glitzy style that might initially strike some as vacant or shallow, the film is a much more layered look at modern dating, and the values that often keep us from connecting.
Regardless of whether we like to admit it or not (even to ourselves), everyone walks around with a mental checklist of attributes they want a potential partner to have. We’ve seen many movies about this from a male perspective to the point that people regularly slam it as “sexist” nowadays. But when we’ve seen it from a female perspective, which has been often as well, it’s rarely called out. In Materialists, Johnson’s character, Lucy, makes her living by exploiting this shallowness on both sides. The men she sets up tend to value two things above everything else – beauty and youth. Women, on the other hand, seem mostly, in this movie anyway – to care about wealth and height. Song never presents the couples she sets up as being deserving of a storybook happy ending. As presented here, these are people making business deals, exchanging one thing (beauty and youth) for another (wealth and status).
Song deserves a lot of credit for making an honest film, and not overly concerned herself with trying to be “fair”, with her showing Johnson’s various clients all being rejected for the shallowest of reasons, with no one guaranteed a happy ending. Far from it, actually – as the message behind the entire film seems to be that any relationship consummated as a kind of business deal is a shallow one that’s unlikely to lead to real, lasting happiness.
Yet, a few things keep Materialists from being a stone-cold classic of the genre. For one, Dakota Johnson’s character, Lucy, doesn’t feel real – at least not as she plays it. Song goes out of her way to make a cynical, honest look at modern dating, but then gives us a character who, while initially presented as mercenary as anyone else, makes an all too predictable pivot as the film progresses. She’s supposed to be torn between Pedro Pascal’s impossibly rich, handsome, kind, if slightly dull Harry, and Chris Evans’s poor, also handsome, and immature John who, approaching his forties, can still barely eke out a living. If you’re being honest, there’s no world where a character like Lucy would find herself torn between these two. Realistically, she’d end up with Harry, but the movie wants you to believe she could go either way, and clearly seems to be rooting for Evans’s John.
Yet, Johnson herself plays Lucy in such a cool, detached way that you also question the sincerity of either man’s attraction to her beyond shallow reasons. She and Evans have nothing in common, so why is he in love with her, beyond the fact that she’s pretty? Song, in my opinion, made a fatal mistake as far as her casting went, as she cast the movie too conventionally, with three gorgeous actors. They’re all good in the film, but they also play very close to type, with Evans the eternal adolescent (which he’s played in all his non-Marvel movies), Johnson the aloof beauty, and Pascal the dreamboat.
All that said, there’s still a lot to like about Materialists, with the script almost perfect, and the movie’s visual style containing an elegance rarely seen in modern film. The casting simply lets it down, although again, no one is actually bad. Imagine if, when making Broadcast News, James L. Brooks had cast Harrison Ford in the Albert Brooks role and Sharon Stone in the Holly Hunter role. It would have totally thrown off the movie’s recipe, right? That’s kind of what happens here.
