A Love Story That's Afraid of Romance

The Atlantic

5 hours ago

Modern dating, experts have lamented, has become a numbers game; the more matches you make, the more likely you are to land a mate. But in the new film Materialists, the only number that really matters is a suitor's net worth. Take Harry (played by Pedro Pascal), for example: He's a partner in a private-equity firm and the owner of a $12 million penthouse apartment in Manhattan. John (Chris Evans), meanwhile, lives paycheck to paycheck as an aspiring actor and part-time cater waiter who splits his rent with roommates. Between the two of them, Harry's the obvious 'unicorn'—the most desirable kind of bachelor, according to Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a professional matchmaker and the film's protagonist. Lucy sees dating as a marketplace of potential spouses whose worth is determined by their income as much as their looks. Never mind their interests or how they'd treat a partner; a guy like Harry is inherently more valuable than someone like John.
Lucy isn't heartless. Rather, she sees herself as pragmatic about modern romance. Materialists, the writer-director Celine Song's follow-up to her sensitive Oscar-nominated feature, Past Lives, tracks Lucy as she finds matches for her clients, many of whom also think about future partners as commodities. The men tell her that they want women under a certain BMI and age; the women want men above a certain height and tax bracket. As amused as she might sometimes be by their demands, Lucy promises to introduce them to their 'grave buddy.' To her, finding love should be easy—it's just math, she likes to say—yet Lucy's own love life has remained stagnant. She asserts to anyone who asks that she'll either marry rich or die alone.
This being a romantic dramedy, Lucy ends up in something of a love triangle anyway: She falls for Harry while harboring a lingering affection for John, who happens to be her ex. But her predicament isn't really about which suitor she'll choose; instead, she's caught between two versions of herself—the cash-strapped idealist who once pursued acting alongside John, and the polished working girl she's become. The core conflict of Materialists is similar to that of Past Lives, yet Song renders it less successfully here. Lucy's journey takes too many cynical turns to be satisfying, and the film's ideas are too scattershot to be convincing. Materialists falters most when it tries to mesh its competing aims: to deliver a throwback love story while also deconstructing the reality of modern dating. Instead, in the end, the film resembles the very world it tries to critique, offering a litany of observations about finding The One without ever substantially arguing for any of them.
The film's glossy veneer of confidence, much like that of its lead, belies an uncertainty. Apart from some punchy dialogue probing the economy of marriage, its tale is shallow, with almost nonexistent stakes. John and Harry pose little challenge to Lucy's notions about partners needing to check each other's superficial boxes; both are handsome and smitten with her, and the disparity in their wealth never presents much of an obstacle for Lucy either. She had taken issue with John's poverty when they were together, as shown in a clunkily inserted flashback, but his finances are a mere asterisk to their present-day dynamic.
Lucy is as thinly written as her suitors—a nod, maybe, to the threadbare profiles of app-fueled dating, but one that makes her a frustratingly inscrutable romantic lead. It doesn't help that Johnson, whose flat affect can be an asset in enigmatic dramas such as The Lost Daughter, isn't particularly believable as a woman with hang-ups about money. (If she's the provenance behind ' iPhone face ' in the misguided Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, here she has what I call 'property-portfolio face.') The bigger problem, however, lies in Lucy's inelegant transformation from a skeptic about love to a wholehearted believer in it. When her most persistent client, Sophie (Zoë Winters), is sexually assaulted on a date, Sophie alternates between being furious at and grateful for Lucy, leaving the third act a confused mess. Although Winters captures Sophie's despair, her character gets compressed into a plot point and her arc produces a jarring shift in mood. Lucy's realization that she should, as Sophie advises her, treat her clients as more than 'merchandise' rings hollow as a result.
Not to sound like someone still pining for an ex, but Materialists made me miss the work Song did in Past Lives. In that film, which followed a married woman yearning for the person she used to be after reconnecting with her childhood crush, Song used intimate specificity to unearth reflections about love—romantic, platonic, and otherwise. In Materialists, the director has essentially done the opposite: Her characters are mouthpieces for broad philosophies about connection, while their stories end up getting buried. The effect is a work that's tonally at odds with itself. Though Materialists is similarly packed with insightful monologues, it's heavy-handed in a way that Past Lives never was. Song bookends her latest with sappy scenes of prehistoric humans falling in love, and she injects flippancy into moments that call for sentimentality: When Lucy and Harry finally have a much-needed conversation, the script incorporates an absurd bit of physical comedy that undermines the poignancy of their heart-to-heart.
There's much about Song's movie that I enjoyed. The fizzy sequences of Lucy meeting one client after the next, inspired by the director's own experience as a matchmaker, remind me of classics such as Broadcast News; they offer a glimpse into a gig that consumes a person whole. Besides, there's a real pleasure in seeing Hollywood stars fall for each other. But in trying to both critique and poke fun at the costs of modern love, Materialists never coheres into an emotionally potent tale. To put it in Lucy's terms: The film is beautiful and smart, and it clearly contains enough appeal to make it stand out in the marketplace. It's just no unicorn.