Materialists
Celine Song’s anti rom-com about the superficiality of dating eats its own wedding cake.
Professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson) understands the dating game like the stock market, a suitable life partner is only as attractive as their assets: height, income, age, and how much they tick the boxes of the other, he ability to perfectly utilises this mathematical equation has led to nine marriages from her client list. In this bourgeois market of New York, everyone is looking for the perfect partner, most importantly someone who makes them feel “valuable”. Lucy herself is just as materialistic in her desires when she finds the prefect package deal in the form of Pedro Pascal’s Harry, a handsome wealthy six feet tall “unicorn” who quickly impresses Lucy with his penthouse apartment, fancy dinners, and trips abroad. It seems like a perfect match with both parties getting a fair deal, until Lucy runs into her broke ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) who is working for a catering company while struggling to make it as a theatre actor. John’s financial instability is what led Lucy to terminate their relationship as a future of cheap street food meals was just not good enough. John’s presence doesn’t put a spanner in the works the way genre conventions would expect them to, but as Lucy faces unforeseen revelations in her profession John seems to offer the only pure affection in her life.
As she demonstrated with her knock-out debut feature Past Live (2023), Celine Song is a confidently acute writer, director who dissects the dynamics of love in a piercingly raw battle between fantasy vs reality. If Past Lives was about the love story that never happened, Materialists is about how much ‘love’ is worth to people. Song is candid but non-judgemental to her characters who talk about their selfish wants and needs with plain sincerity. Song’s take down of contemporary courtship has playful cynicism with razor-sharp business exchanges about the marketability of soulmates, in this world men and women are not human but products to sell at the right price. There is a throw-back feel to the witty Manhattan rom-coms of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron with an updated Jane Austen sense of privilege. The culture that Song presents is ugly with transactional relations, often it's funny how shallow these people are, but Song draws into how deeply melancholic it all really is. It takes one of Lucy’s lingering clients Sophie (Zoë Winters) to have an abusive encounter with one of her matches for Lucy to realise that perhaps matchmaking is not as simple as she thought.
Dakota Johnson is an ideally cast as she rocks her high-profile profession, completely transparent to her own materialism which makes her crafty hustle to sell all the more believable. Pedro Pascal is very much being himself with the smooth charm turned up all the way to 11, he could be the sort of character you loath but there is a genuine softness to him. Chris Evans feels slightly out of place for the poor out of work second choice, even for the ‘he’s a nice guy’ role, Evan’s uncompromising charm is equally competitive to Pascal.
Lucy begins to question whether the guy who ticks all the right boxes with all the money in the world will truly make her happy, her journey to realise how much genuine love matters in a relationship comes across as naively obvious. Materialists inevitably folds into sentimental submission with a basic life lesson as old as the stable boy. When the film shifts focus to Lucy and John’s relationship, so much of their attraction to each other appears missing from the script as very little of their history is unpacked which makes their chemistry much less tangible. They love each other but can’t be together because John can’t afford it, but why it is exactly they were drawn to each other in the first place remains a mystery. Even when your second choice is Chris Evans, there’s still some superficial selection going on, and the film fails to offer a deeper reason.
Song’s conclusion follows a generic narrative that goes for the feels yet is unearned. That is to say that Materialists has its cake and eats it. A more brutal director may have dug deeper into the vacuous soul of these characters without consolidating for a happily ever after, but even Song is a kind enough writer to think everyone deserves a chance at happiness, even someone as selfish as Lucy.
“Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”- Luke 12:7
There is a lesson in Materialists that reminds us of everyone’s intrinsic value no matter how selfless or selfish, no matter how many inches, the father God looks at everyone as precious children, Celine Song’s film is an exposure to how much this form of affection and gaze is what is truly missing from dating world let alone the world itself.
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