In the scant verdure of a steep, rocky landscape, a man in earthy rags sets down a bag of crude tools and picks out a single white flower, then loops its stem around the finger of a woman in a fur pelt. From our present vantage, on the other side of some millennia, the gesture is laden with all kinds of meaning: a marital promise, an exchange of goods—or just a token of animal affection? But the prehistoric ur-couple radiate a kind of naïve clarity, their faces brimming with the joy they find in each other. This is the brief and unexpected opening of Celine Song’s Materialists, a prologue that announces a certain loftiness in the film’s premise. Or in spite of it, as a sudden cut flings us into the classic opener of many a millennial rom-com: the cosmopolitan heroine at her vanity, getting ready for her white-collar job in the big city.
We meet our protagonist, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), in a sunlit montage of her morning routine somewhere in downtown Manhattan. Twenty years ago, Lucy would’ve probably been a media worker—an advice columnist; a magazine editor—but in this economy, she’s the star employee of a high-end matchmaking company, with no fewer than nine weddings under her belt. With a client pool of private equity managers and CFOs, Lucy is aware of how her ivory satin blouse and artful flashes of silver jewelry command a certain type of attention, her body a bundle of class signifiers that quietly telegraph wealth. Within minutes in public, she has handed her business card to a man who eyes her on the street. His look is forthright, primal; hers is never so simple, subjecting his romantic potential to a private, discerning calculus.
What better genre than the rom-com to stage a confrontation between personal desire and social expectation? Across the late 1990s and early 2000s, a boom in rom-com production shaped the mainstream cultural register, with box-office hits like Hitch (2005) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) redefining the genre’s metrics of commercial success. After a relative lull in the 2010s, a recent wave of mid-budget productions—including Anyone but You (2023), starring Glen Powell, the toothy leading man of the moment, and last year’s fan fiction–inspired The Idea of You—suggests a resurgence of earnest stories about lovelorn individuals entwined by chance and locked in a pas de deux with life’s foibles. Materialists seems to ride this momentum while purporting to offer something more cerebral and subversive.
Lucy is a hawker of romantic promise who approaches her own love life with mercenary pragmatism. The catch, of course, is that her methodical system of computing value trips on the unknown variable of the human heart. We’re introduced to the duo that tests the certitude of her professed desires at the extravagant wedding of a wealthy client. There’s the older, smooth-talking Harry (Pedro Pascal), an investment banker and brother to the groom, at ease in the grandeur of gilded rooms with vaulting ceilings and dripping chandeliers. A single calla lily sits in the boutonniere of his pristine tux; a luxury watch curls around his left wrist. Then there’s John (Chris Evans), a struggling theater actor-cum-cater-waiter and proud Bernie voter with a broad Bostonian drawl, his only commending factor a romantic history with Lucy. If Harry seems to promise a life of ballrooms and grand entrances—of taking up space—John is all table-side interruptions and stolen moments at the staff exit. The first time we see Lucy and John speak privately, it’s in the loading zone outside the reception venue, sneaking a cigarette and a catch-up as he packs up the catering van.
In Lucy’s line of work, everything begins with the quantitative. Client lists of nonnegotiables read like a barrage of demographic data, familiar to anyone who has ever used a dating app: six feet; BMI under 20; income over $500k; not a day older than 30. This numerical fixation is so pervasive that Lucy likens being a matchmaker to working at the morgue or at an insurance company. But among present or future clients, she flips a switch, pivoting to her sales pitch: the dream of a lifelong love. “Who our partner is determines our whole life,” she says to a gaggle of rapt young women at the wedding reception, handing out her business card. Whenever someone assumes she must have some preternatural instinct for romantic compatibility, Lucy dispels the suggestion with a pithy refrain. It’s just math, she repeats, over and over—which is how we know it isn’t. As any good salesperson can tell you, you need to buy into the fantasy, even just a little, if you really want to sell it.
It should be simple. Harry is, in Lucy’s words, “an impossible fantasy.” He’s tall, handsome, generationally wealthy, the sole proprietor of a $12 million penthouse, and insistent on dating Lucy. Ever the savvy rom-com heroine, Lucy thinks she knows what she wants (to marry a very, very rich man), and what she’s worth (not much, according to herself). But on their early dates, as they traverse one pricey, candlelit joint after another, she equivocates: “I don’t know if I like you, or if I like the places you take me.” If Lucy’s job has overexposed her to the vast pool of eligible women and calcified her low self-esteem, it’s amplified a confidence in her own canniness. She sees her appearance as less of an asset than her knowledge of its comparative worth, and believes her hard-won self-awareness will be enough to protect her, like the carapace of her pessimism.
Contrary to the clamor around contemporary dating and its miserable vernacular of objectification, market metaphors for courtship are nothing new. In 1941, an issue of the now-defunct Senior Scholastic magazine quoted two unnamed boys who shared their thoughts on dating: “Going Steady is like buying the first car you see—only a car has a trade in value later on.” Early in Materialists, Lucy and a co-worker insist that, when it comes to height, “six inches can double a man’s value on the market.” The language of commodity persists. Your love life is a major investment; you’re looking for someone who’s the whole package; you’re either on or off the market.
It’s no coincidence that the emergence of dating as a social phenomenon (at least in the West) is roughly contemporaneous with major economic transformations in the early twentieth century. Prior to the last century, the pairing of two individuals was most often mediated by family members or community leaders. The practice of moving through a roster of potential partners corresponded with more women entering the workforce, a growing leisure class, and mass urban migrations, among other shifts. The historical transformations in how we conceptualize dating and marriage should generate friction in their contradictions. In one direction, the pull of pragmatism; in the other, love as sacred and ineffable. But in Materialists, what is it about “modern dating” that Song hopes to articulate?
As with her debut feature, Past Lives (2023), which sourced its themes about the cultural rupture and homeward longing of first-generation immigrants from Song’s own life, the director draws on personal experience for Materialists. She worked as a matchmaker after moving to New York over a decade ago, and in her six months on the job, she has said, she learned more about people than she did at any other time in her life. “I knew more than their therapists,” she has related in interviews, a line that Lucy’s boss utters almost verbatim in the film. But for all Song’s efforts to interrogate the frank materialism of contemporary dating, the film’s ideas feel somehow anachronistic, as if they’ve been caught in a buffering delay. Raya is now 10 years old, and the glut of think pieces and Substack posts about the various travails of online dating could constitute their own subgenre.
If Materialists had burst into the early 2000s, during the Sex and the City era of politically anesthetized escapist media (how does a freelance journalist afford an apartment like that in Manhattan?), Lucy’s unabashed pursuit of wealthy men might have seemed bolder in its class confrontations. But now, when you can buy No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism T-shirts from Amazon, and the phrase “emotional labor” has become both an inducer of eye rolls and a weaponized microaggression, the revelations in Materialists are mostly tepid. The film’s insistence on its own universalism, too, plays like a needless foil to Past Lives and its engagement with the minutiae of interracial dating and cultural identity.
Perhaps the starkest instance of departure from genre here is the absence of a vital rom-com trope: the token best friend or zany sidekick who varyingly challenges or affirms the protagonist’s love life. The lack of friendship in the film becomes baffling to the point of distraction. When one of Lucy’s former clients is being stalked by the man who assaulted her, she calls Lucy, panicking, because she doesn’t have “any friends in the city”; when Lucy backs out of a trip to Iceland with Harry and needs a place to crash, she shows up at John’s front door, because—why, exactly? How many years has she been living in New York? Every character is either a co-worker, client, or a potential lover. The film’s hermetic exclusion of other communal arrangements unwittingly reflects how the parochial pursuit of romance itself can be a consequence of social alienation.
In the latter half of Materialists, its ideas start to feel belabored, more contrived. The issue, though, is not narrative contrivance, arguably the very source of genre films’ pleasures, the affective certainty of their unfolding tropes; it’s that the dialogue is often jarring, oddly forced. It reflects a broader problem with the writing: It’s apparent that certain ideas are imposed onto characters instead of emerging from them, as if they are mouthpieces for wide-ranging observations about relationships and risk. This verbosity is likely a carryover from Song’s background as a playwright, allusions to which pepper the film. We see John performing in a play wherein his delivery is coldly Brechtian, discernibly experimental, and alienating to Harry; there’s the briefest flash of an Antonin Artaud poster in his apartment. Even if the financial allegories strewn into the characters’ speech sound stilted by design, the sheer volume of these lines begins to feel intrusive.
Materialists’ strength, however, is in its casting, especially of Lucy’s earnest paramours. Pascal softens the off-puttingly perfect Harry with enough sincerity to make him endearing, and Evans has perfected the disarming look of a wounded, heartsick fool. In the wedding scene, the groom’s father opens his speech with a thesis on love—“the last religion, the last country, the last surviving ideology”—and for all the film’s shortcomings, the performances almost make you believe it.
The post Celine Song’s Materialists Tries to Subvert the Rom-Com appeared first on New Republic.
