‘Materialists' is a smart and funny all-star love triangle with its own commitment issues

Los Angeles Times

21 hours ago

Dakota Johnson is my favorite seductress, a femme fatale of a flavor that didn't exist until she invented it. A third-generation celebrity, she toys with interviewers who come on too strongly (especially about the 'Fifty Shades' movies, her trilogy of BSDM blockbusters), coyly enticing them to trip over their own tongues. Onscreen, she excels at playing skeptics who are privately amused by the shenanigans of attaching yourself to another person. She shrugs to conquer.
Which makes Johnson the perfect avatar for a time when it's hard to commit or keep swiping right. 'Materialists,' Celine Song's follow-up to her Oscar-nominated debut 'Past Lives,' casts Johnson perfectly as an advertisement for taking the romance out of love. When her Lucy gets checked out on the street, she hands the guy a card introducing herself as a professional Manhattan matchmaker. She can peg a person's height at a glance and sum up their prospects in a pitiless snap judgment. Hearing that a friend of a friend is getting serious with a nude webcam model, she says coolly: 'He's a 5-foot-7 depressed novelist who's never been published — he couldn't do better.'
Lucy likens her job to being a mortician or life insurance broker. She can reduce someone to a few simple stats: height, weight, education, parentage and bank balance. And you should hear the terrible things she says about herself. 'If anything, I have a negative dowry,' Lucy admits, insisting that she has zero intention to wed herself unless the groom is very rich. But she's also a marriage-minded mercenary who can pitch one potential client on soppy platitudes about till death do you part, and immediately pivot to assuring a bride that it's just a business deal.
We're infatuated with this minx. So are two suitors from opposite sides of the tracks: Harry (Pedro Pascal), a private equity Prince Charming, and John (Chris Evans), a cash-strapped actor and cater-waiter whom Lucy already dumped for being poor. The way Song phrases their breakup is insightful: Hating his poverty makes Lucy hate herself. Meanwhile, when Harry invites Lucy up for a nightcap, she kisses him with her eyes open so she can appraise his $12-million loft.
Will Lucy choose either man or neither? Once again, Song uses a love triangle plot to explore her ideas about self-actualization. 'Past Lives,' her lightly autobiographical breakthrough, tasked a writer to choose between her South Korean childhood beau and her hapless and less successful American husband — that is, to decide whether to keep chasing youthful dreams or settle for adult reality. I liked chunks of the film, but it rankled me that she framed the spouse as such a consolation-prize loser to make her heroine come off as sacrificial. Let her be selfish; it's more interesting.
Here, Lucy is weighing comfort versus struggle. For good measure, Song has also saddled Evans with the worst haircut and scruff of his career. But tilt 'Materialists' at an angle and it's the same film as 'Past Lives,' only bolder and funnier. Really, Song wants to know whether a sensible girl can justify shackling herself to a broke creative.
Song doesn't merely fold money into the mix. She's made it so intrinsic to her plot, for so many believable reasons, that it's also the icing and the cherry on the wedding cake. The script lets Lucy say and do all the crass things that usually belong to the rom-com villainess — the shallow snob who is supposed to lose out to a sweeter heroine — telling Harry that her favorite thing about him is how confidentially he picks up the check. (I gasped to see her walk out of a bar, tactlessly ordering him to cover the tab.) Nearly every line in the film's ferociously hilarious first hour is like Jane Austen reborn as a shock jock, until Song runs out of material and starts repeating herself.
Love should be simple, 'Materialists' believes. It opens (and closes) with an ideal couple: two cave people who pledge their commitment with a fistful of daisies. Unknown millennia later, you'll spot dried daisies on Lucy's dresser, along with more exotic blossoms and puffs and powders that show how overly elaborate courtship has become. Those primitive sweethearts couldn't imagine the need for a shepherd to steer every step of their relationship. What are they, troglodytes?
Well, Lucy's 21st century clients are. The requirements they foist on her are superficial and soul-crushing (and the bit players who deliver them are hilarious). New York City, with its high concentration of Wall Street finance bros, is a perfect setting to caricature people who score their dates on a spreadsheet. No wonder Lucy eventually snaps and spits out a venomous monologue straight to the camera. (The cinematographer Shabier Kirchner knows when to hold still and when to sashay around a room.) Even Lucy's favorite customer, Sophie (Zoe Winters), isn't that noble. Upon learning her last match isn't interested, she hisses, 'He's balding!'
Lucy tries to mark up her clients' value to each other, next selling Sophie on a strapping 5-foot-11 bachelor while leaving out that her personal assessment of him is that he's charmless and boring. She maintains that opposites don't attract. Harry counters that she might be comparing the wrong data points. Yes, she's poor and he's rich, but they're both hustlers — one way he flirts is telling Lucy he sees potential in her intangibles. It's impossible not to be won over by the way Pascal gives Lucy a tiny smile as he kisses her knuckles. For balance, there's also a scene where Lucy and John stand so close to each other without touching that their chemistry is suffocating.
A friend recently gave me a book of the first-ever newspaper advice columns from the 1690s. One questioner asked, 'Are most marriages in this age made for money?' The response was curt: 'Both in this age and in all others.' Fair enough, but in our age, it's refreshing to hear someone admit it. Which makes it a shame when Song feels compelled to slap on a happy ending that you simply don't think she believes.
Two films into her career, she still writes scenes better than full scripts. For the sake of one great moment, she'll ask us to forget all the other ones it obliterates. Here, she literally follows up an argument about the impossibility of finding parking in Manhattan by cutting to a shot of the same people in the same car magically pulling up to a spot in front of Lucy's apartment.
That's a silly example, but a more pointed one would give away the plot. The final stretch is so absurd that I turned into a jilted lover who kept score of every minor sin to vindicate why the film had broken my trust. I even got ticked off at the clothes Lucy packs for a trip to Iceland.
Maybe on her third film, Song will tell us what she really thinks for the full running time. I respect how she writes women who fear that their hearts run too cold to ever feel truly fulfilled. As Pascal's Harry might say, her blunt and brutal parts have a special appeal. Exiting the film, I had the same surge of feeling I did after 'Past Lives.' I wanted to drag Song straight to a couple's therapist and say: I want to commit, but she cheats.