Materialists review – Celine Song's Past Lives follow-up is a mixed bag

The Guardian

19 hours ago

In the style of Lucy, Dakota Johnson's shrewd matchmaker in Celine Song's new film Materialists, I'll be blunt: dating is tough these days. It's probably always been tough, even back when the first couple of cave people tried it out – a scenario Song, who broke out with the winning naturalism and precise sensitivity of her 2023 debut Past Lives, imagines in bizarre bookends to her otherwise naturalistic, sharp-eyed romcom of modern love in New York. One needn't look back quite so far, but marriage, as Lucy puts it to a skittish client minutes before her very expensive wedding, has always been a business transaction – once a couple goats between families, then a dowry, now a more amorphous negotiation of intangible and material assets. To date today is to endure a slog of judgments, preferences, logistics and rejection that seem to only intensify the longer you stay on the market, as they say.
And they say it a lot; Lucy and her ilk, a boutique matchmaking firm with a downtown office, are fluent in the depersonalized business-speak of the dating economy. They traffic in asset optimization and management, seeking a 'good match' that 'checks all our boxes,' navigating 'non-negotiables' and 'dealbreakers' that often involve dollar signs. (This being a paid matchmaker, the clientele skews rich.) Whereas Past Lives achingly refracted the sublime yearning of childhood sweethearts through the practicalities of distance, time and maturity, Song's sophomore feature hammers the desires of its matchmaker and her many clients through a brutal realism, to a fascinating, if occasionally off-putting, effect.
Which makes Materialists an intriguing specimen and somewhat hot commodity, given the sparse modern marketplace for a theatrical romcom. We're often settling for something mid, something made for streaming, something riffing on or rebooting what has already been done. Clear-eyed, sharp and shot on location with a quiet luxury gloss very much not to be confused with the Netflix sheen, Materialists is like a 6ft 2in finance guy with a sense of humor and emotional availability – rare, highly coveted, immediately intriguing and definitely masking something.
For Lucy, which Johnson plays with her trademark implacability, that would be her heart. She mirrors many campier, looser romcom heroines: motivated by career, skeptical of love, both allergic and susceptible to past attachments. She possesses a knack for selling romance while gaming compatibility along the typical lines of income, family background, education and the murkier ones of attractiveness, humor and style. And yet she remains single, the art of matchmaking having calcified her belief in love into something rigidly practical. To be in the business is to have faith in magic, and also to know better.
True to form, these competing instincts implausibly collide at a client's wedding, in the form of best man Harry (an unfortunately miscast Pedro Pascal), an impossibly suave bachelor with a Tribeca penthouse and a private equity bankroll, and cater-waiter John (Chris Evans), Lucy's ex from her messy, broke 20s still living the messy, broke lifestyle of a struggling actor. Both are handsome and well-meaning; both transparently desire her. Lucy transparently chooses money. One awkward flashback scene, in which Lucy breaks up with John because they were permanently broke, stands in for a years-long compromise, though her bluntness about money – not coming from it, coveting it, tortuously respecting and resenting those with and without it – is one of the film's most singular and intriguing elements.
That Lucy and Harry are not a love match is part of the point, though one wishes that Johnson and Pascal had at least some chemistry; as an actor, Johnson runs cold – suitable for Lucy's world-weariness, but stiff against Pascal's effortful polish. Likewise, one wishes that John, whom Evans imbues with as much everyman charm as Captain America can muster, had any more to him than a fantasy of a starving artist, a hunk with a terrible roommate and a heart of gold.
Neither present particularly compelling love stories, let alone sentimental conclusions, but Materialists has other selling points. Song's lush, astute visual style, for one. Lucy's enviable wardrobe of minimalist professional chic, styled by Katina Danabassis. And most pointedly, the catharsis of hearing people say the quiet parts of dating out loud, ugly and callous as those parts can be. Song, who based the script on her six months as a professional matchmaker during the mid-2010s, turns the unspoken assumptions of dating, the raw material of the market, into some cutthroat lines with equal opportunity skewering. Fortysomething men think thirtysomething women are too complicated and load the word 'fit' to the gills; women won't even look at a man under 6ft. Everyone's expectations are sky-high, both rightfully and beyond ungenerously so.
Materialists tempered by own with its strange amalgamation of qualities, as beguiling as it is frustrating. Rarely have I been so mixed on a film – drawn in by the confessions, put off by the romance, surprised by a line and deadened by another. Many un-cliched observations nonetheless resolve into one that muddles everything that came before, though I certainly don't begrudge a romcom for eventually revealing its heart. Inconsistent but never insubstantial, Materialists is far from perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not worthy of a date.
Materialists is out in Australia on 12 June, the US on 13 June and in the UK on 15 August