Melissa Anderson
A matchmaker girl living in a matrimonial world:
Celine Song’s forgettable new rom-com.
Dakota Johnson as Lucy and Pedro Pascal as Harry in Materialists. Courtesy A24. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima.
Materialists, written and directed by Celine Song,
now in theaters
• • •
“The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life,” declares Edith Massey’s Aunt Ida—horrified to learn that her nephew is about to marry a woman—in John Waters’s Female Trouble (1974). Unwittingly, Celine Song’s Materialists proves the accuracy of Ida’s claim.
Song’s second feature, following the highly autobiographical Past Lives from 2023, also draws from the filmmaker’s personal experience. Lucy (Dakota Johnson), the protagonist of Materialists, is a professional matchmaker at an upscale firm—a gig that Song had for six months a decade ago. Like the earlier movie, in which Song surrogate Nora finds herself torn between a long-ago crush and her devoted husband, Materialists is weakly animated by the shifting sides of a triangle: Will thirtysomething Lucy end up with Harry (Pedro Pascal), a millionaire working in private equity with a palatial apartment in Tribeca, whom she meets at the wedding of one of her clients? Or with John (Chris Evans), an ex-boyfriend from her twenties, still toiling in catering jobs to supplement his meager earnings as an actor and living with two roommates in a walk-up in Brooklyn? The answer to this question is never in doubt. What remains mysterious is why anyone would opt for the models of matrimonial coupledom offered by Materialists, whether the ones lazily mocked or the ones pitifully extolled.
Dakota Johnson as Lucy and Chris Evans as John in Materialists. Courtesy A24. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima.
The film’s prologue evokes the “Dawn of Man” prelude in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Where the segment in Stanley Kubrick’s classic, featuring hominids in savage battle, emphasizes the unflattering truth that eons of violence are humankind’s inheritance, Materialists delusionally imagines our prehistoric ancestors as much gentler: a beaming caveman puts a tiny flower on the finger of a demure cavewoman—a paleo dream wedding.
That prelapsarian moment of simple marital bliss segues to today’s grim reality, in which trying to find lasting romance has become a crushing process reduced to a cycle of gamification and optimization. A superb dissimulator, Lucy is one of the most successful employees at Adore, her Manhattan marriage brokerage. Her workdays are spent assuring her love-starved clients that the crass aspirational numbers they demand in a potential spouse—regarding salary, age, BMI, height, one-to-ten attractiveness scale—are obtainable. These desperate yet supercilious mate-seekers (all of whom, save for a Black closeted-lesbian Republican, are straight) and their demands are frequently shown as a montage, a cluster of pathetic fools for whom the film solicits our contempt.
Dakota Johnson as Lucy in Materialists. Courtesy A24. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima.
While each outrageous specification or display of pique after an unsuccessful first date from one of these lonely hearts is met with Lucy’s polite smile and anodyne encouragement—“So onwards and upwards”—she shares harsher, dehumanizing words about her clientele with her colleagues. “If there’s no specialty appeal, there’s no place in the market for her,” Lucy says of Sophie (Zoe Winters), one of her more intractable, unmatchable customers.
But Lucy, as she herself admits, is just as shallow as these grasping saps. A flashback reveals the beginning of the end of her relationship with John. On the day of their fifth anniversary, she lashes out at his penny-pinching ways: “I don’t want to hate you because you’re poor.” (However mundane, Lucy and John’s tetchy exchange at least evinces Song’s willingness to show coupledom’s more grueling aspects—a stark change from the frictionless Past Lives, in which no member of the triad so much as raises their voice.) And so she begins a relationship with wealthy Harry, for whom she feels little connection but whose Hudson River views really turn her on.
Dakota Johnson as Lucy in Materialists. Courtesy A24. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima.
The night Lucy meets this finance titan, John reenters her life; he’s part of the catering staff at that fateful wedding. Presented as foils, both men—the characters and the actors playing them—are nearly indistinguishable in their utter lack of charisma. If not as fiery and haunted as Isabelle Adjani at her ’70s and ’80s peak, Johnson at times recalls the Gallic legend; at the bare minimum, the actress, descended from two generations of screen icons, knows how to slink across a room, how to keep audiences watching her. Her male costars are plagued by a recessive flatness, a fault of both the writing and the performers. Pascal fails at imbuing hazily sketched-out Harry with even a hint of alpha confidence; John, while given more personality traits and more to do, never rises above the unremarkable, owing to Evans’s strenuous vanilla affect. (As opposed to the actual extract, which Sam, the Lower East Side pickle purveyor played by Peter Riegert in 1988’s Crossing Delancey, mixes with milk to soak his hands in every night to lessen their briny smell. Another Gotham rom-com involving a matchmaker and a female lead divided between a glamorous man and a common man, the older film, unlike Song’s, is vivified by odd details about compelling, flawed, fully fleshed-out adults.)
Dakota Johnson as Lucy and Pedro Pascal as Harry in Materialists. Courtesy A24. Photo: Atsushi Nishijima.
In fact, so much of Materialists is so resolutely generic or instantly forgettable—from the title to its shooting-fish-in-a-barrel humor to its soundtrack choices (should you forget that the film is set in NYC, Cat Power’s “Manhattan” and Harry Nilsson’s “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City” will remind you) to its stale rich man, poor man divide—that its one feral moment truly shocks. After Lucy learns that one of her female clients was assaulted on a date that she arranged, the remorseful matchmaker tracks the woman down, begging forgiveness. It is not granted. “Fuck you! Pimp,” she snarls at Lucy, an explosive scene that hints at the more idiosyncratic, less complacent project that Materialists could have been.
But this abrasive episode is soon smoothed over, following some far-fetched plot contrivances that transform Lucy from the traumatized woman’s nemesis to her savior. Accompanying Lucy’s redemption is a restored moral compass. Reborn, she knows who the right man to marry is. Matrimony is never presented as anything less than an inevitability—yet one that has little to do with passion and romance but instead project management. Saying “I do” is diminished to barely more than a desired end result. Materialists has the impersonality and the soullessness of the turbo-capitalist language that Lucy uses to trash-talk her clients.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.