‘Materialists' Review: Celine Song's Follow-Up to ‘Past Lives' Is a Rom-Com Played Straight, With Dakota Johnson as a Matchmaker Tangled Up in Love and Money

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Back in the day, you would have been hard-pressed to find a bigger fan of 'Sex and the City' than I was. Yet even as I think it's a deliriously great show, a part of me — the movie critic side — has always wondered, in the back of my mind, what 'Sex and the City' might have looked like had it been played, at times, as less of a wild confectionary sitcom and a bit more close to the bone.
'Materialists,' a lavishly charming New York story of love, money, and dating, is the movie that finally answers that question for me. It's the second feature written and directed by Celine Song, who made the wistfully sublime 'Past Lives,' and it stars Dakota Johnson as a stylishly crisp, take-charge professional matchmaker and Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal as the men she winds up caught between. (Evans plays a scruffy aspiring theater actor with no money, Pascal plays a sweet-talking private-equity broker who lives in a $12 million apartment, and you can kind of fill in the rest from there.)
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'Materialists' sounds like a romantic comedy, and its distributor, A24, is certainly selling it as one. Yet the film is more like a beguiling contradiction — a rom-com played straight. While it's all too easy to imagine the breezy '90s version of this movie (Sandra Bullock as a matchmaker…who can't match with anyone herself…until she meets the mismatch of her dreams!), 'Materialists' is very much not that movie. It's a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now, and about how connected that is (or not) to the way we've always lived. And there's a dark side to it. It's 'Sex and the City' filtered through a sobering reality check.
The film is set in the elite but real New York society of people searching for mates who truly have it all: the looks, the personality, the good taste, the height (that's a major one), the better-than-mid-range six-figure income. And the reason this rarefied milieu liberates the movie, rather than hemming it into some snooty one-percent demimonde of obnoxiousness, is that it allows 'Materalists' to really be about money — or, rather, the ways that love and money have come to dance together.
Lucy (Johnson) is a dating consultant for Adore, a company that makes a promise to each of its clients: 'You're going to marry the love of your life.' The service attempts to live up to that promise by respecting how choosy the clients are, coddling their perfectionism. After a date, Lucy will make a private call to each of the two people to see how it went, and to massage their egos ('He checked a lot of our boxes. And you checked a lot of his'), and to assess whether a second date is in the offing. It's scientific matchmaking with a dollop of feel-good therapy.
Adore isn't an online dating app, but the service it provides reflects the shift in consciousness that was brought about by online dating, which turned the very paradigm of 'romance' into an endless shopping mall. It turned the pursuit of love into shopping. You might say that's what it always was, but those of us old enough to remember dating before the Internet can testify: No, it wasn't (not like it is now).
Yet even as Lucy's clients, women and men alike, are prima donnas with impossible standards (we see them in witty montages), trying to assemble their ideal 'traits' into a single human being, there's a way the movie also looks back — to the ethos of Jane Austen (which fueled so much of the 'Masterpiece Theatre' genre that held sway before the Internet came in), and to Edith Wharton, that supreme chronicler of love and money who was America's greatest novelist because of how profoundly she explored the intricacy of women's desires.
Celine Song's dialogue pings with wit and perception, yet it also flows; it you could bottle that skill, Hollywood would be saved. And Dakota Johnson delivers the most forceful performance I've seen her give. What I think of as that sugary-voiced Dakota Johnson daze, winning as it can be, is gone, replaced by a radiant sharpness that just about tingles. Lucy gets right onto the wavelength of her clients (she's a master of lines like, 'You're not ugly, you just don't have money'), but the mystery of the movie is what she really believes and wants.
She seems, in certain ways, like a materialistic social climber herself. But she only makes $80,000 a year, and she's still good friends with her actor ex, John (Evans), who survives as a part-time cater waiter and still has two loser-bro roommates. That sounds like a comic situation (and does produce one bitingly funny scene), but Song doesn't go in for cheap shots or easy laughs. John's lack of success is all too real, and so is the fact that it basically ended his and Lucy's relationship. We see a flashback to their fifth anniversary date, and it's a lived-in disaster of cheapskate bad planning. The message is pesky but powerful: In romance, money matters.
I've seen Chris Evans sleepwalk through roles, but not here. He's wide awake, with an anger that just makes his tenderness more appealing. And Pedro Pascal is note-perfect as a character who comes off as the film's equivalent of Chris Noth's Mr. Big. Pascal, looking like Burt Reynolds in his sexy mustache days, is effortlessly winning as the finance honcho who miraculously appears to be as nice as he is entitled. He's what Lucy and the Adore team call a unicorn — the 'perfect' man every woman is looking for.
'Materialists' is a tale of love in the age of endless choice and obsessive control, when people have come to believe they can script and design their own lives. Cosmetic surgery figures into the film's tart exchanges, and into its plot as well (there's an extreme procedure, which costs several hundred grand, that's there to give the audience major pause). Underneath it all, the film recognizes, without ever quite coming out and saying it, that in the new gilded age of aspiration, with all the money increasingly concentrated at the top, 'romance,' for too many people, is becoming a contest to enter the upper strata. (When they throw a ritual party in the Adore offices to celebrate Lucy's ninth match that resulted in a marriage, it's as if they're celebrating a merger.) More and more, the perception is that it's all or nothing. And that its own form of corruption.
In a classic rom-com, Lucy's situation would be resolved in a way that's fizzy and a bit crazy, and that would be the champagne pleasure of it all. But 'Materialists,' in its culminating twists and turns, actually runs into a bit of a dilemma due to its straight-on realistic tone. We see which man Lucy belongs with, and we feel the romantic tug between them. Yet there isn't that mad charge of discovery to it, and the film actually has to cheat the money situation a bit (in the moment when we learn that one character has been too much of a financial purist). The film's doesn't give you a surge, and that could limit its popular appeal. 'Sex and the City' had a way of staying light and bubbly. 'Materialists,' at times, feels like 'Sex and the City' made by Eric Rohmer. Yet I mean that (mostly) as a compliment, even if the film, at least at the box office, may not end up showing you the money.
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