Directed by: Celine Song
Distributed by: A24
Written by Anna Harrison
70/100
Love in the time of Tinder is hard. Well, it’s probably always been hard, but now—despite the legions of profiles beckoning for us to swipe right—it’s never been easier to share how hard it is. Screenshots of insane messages on dating apps. Twitter threads of first dates gone wrong. Voice memos to your friends at midnight. It certainly feels harder than it ever has before, even if only because everything has gotten a lot louder.
Sometimes, it’s easier to take things off of your hands and deposit them in the lap of someone else. In the case of Celine Song’s “Materialists,” that someone would be Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a star employee at Adore, a matchmaking company. The desperate singles of New York come to her and she boils each of them down to a list of attributes: height, income, political beliefs, kids or no kids. For Lucy, matchmaking is not a passion, it’s a science—and one she’s good at. To her clients, she puts on a front of genuine human connection, but behind closed doors, each one is only a list of boxes to be ticked.
As an actor, Johnson has always displayed a level of self-awareness that has, in some cases, inhibited her performances. She knows that you know that she knows that she’s acting; it would seem perfectly natural for her to turn to the camera and wink at the audience. In some cases, this means she falls flat. In “Materialists,” however, she shines. Johnson’s ironic detachment as a performer makes her a perfect match for Lucy, whose cold analysis of love and value means she keeps even her own heart at arm’s length.
When Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal) at a client’s wedding, the sparks don’t fly. Oh, sure, it’s two unfairly attractive people flirting with each other, so it’s certainly charming. But both Lucy and Harry are in the habit of intellectualizing their dalliances; Lucy even lists out every reason that she’s a bad match for Harry. Undeterred, however, Harry plows on, and Lucy, against her better judgement, begins to like him—and his money, since Harry works in private equity (and, surprisingly, isn’t an utter piece of shit).
But then there’s John (Chris Evans), Lucy’s ex-boyfriend. She runs into him at the same wedding, though unlike Harry, he’s not a guest: he’s a cater waiter, scraping to save up enough money for the rent of his shared three-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, and still dreaming of making it as a theater actor despite pushing forty. He and Lucy fall back into each other’s orbit quickly, if a little uncomfortably, drawn back together by the strings of fate, and while the movie needed more time with just the two of them to truly invite a buy-in, Evans gives his best performance since “Knives Out,” and his perfectly mussed hair does a lot of heavy lifting here.
On paper, John has very little going for him. On paper, Harry is the obvious match. Of course, nothing is ever so simple as that. Thankfully, the ensuing love triangle can barely even be called that: there are no theatrics, no fights, just three adults being adults. Harry and Lucy even attend one of John’s excruciating plays together.
Under Song, what could have been melodrama instead becomes something closer to melancholy, as Lucy begins to examine the equation of love she solves every day for her job. What happens when a business deal goes south? In private equity, you might lose a few million dollars. In dating, you stand to lose a lot more: happiness, dignity, and even bodily autonomy, as Lucy learns when a client of hers gets assaulted (which is either a sharp reminder of the dangers women face in dating or simply a clumsy vehicle for Lucy’s growth, depending on how you look at it). Suddenly, Lucy finds herself at a loss as her careful intellectualization of love begins to crumble.
But if you’re expecting a magical “love fixes all” kind of message, think again—Song is refreshingly frank in her take on modern love, warts and all. Money matters. Money matters quite a lot, especially in New York, and the lack of it can ruin love (as experienced by Lucy and John on their first go ’round). Height matters. The material things in life help to shape it, and intangible things like love can only change so much. That Lucy begins to see beyond all of these things never negates their weight. Even the big, sweeping, romantic monologue towards the end of the movie gets broken up, interrupted by late-night calls and friends in crisis.
In its own way, though, the cynicism of “Materialists” only makes it more romantic; that the ugly parts get said out loud only make the pretty things prettier. Love is hard. Period. But we have been chasing it since we lived in caves and had no rings to give each other, and we will be chasing it until we die out. Just because it’s a little (a lot) transactional doesn’t make it any less worth it.
“Materialists” Trailer
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