“I’m asking here for the bare minimum,” begs the most frustrated client of professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson). “I don’t want to settle.” Her bare minimum, by the way, is a salary of 150K or above, a height of six feet or above, and a full head of hair. Materialists, then, is a romcom made for late-stage capitalism, populated by people who seek love like they’re negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. If you don’t think they’re real (one man insists he’ll only date a “20 BMI” or under), then you just haven’t met them yet.
Director Celine Song, as in her debut Past Lives (2023), draws here from real experience. She worked briefly in the matchmaking field, and so takes a knowledgeable and dexterous approach to its operations. It’s a film that works beautifully as an intellectual exercise. Ironically, it’s in the love stuff where it starts to falter.
The film’s tone has proven somewhat divisive with audiences and critics (it was released back in June in the US). At times, it borders on farce, like when Lucy and a colleague feverishly discuss the benefits of height surgery, in which the bones are broken and forcibly separated (“six inches can double a man’s value on the market!”). Then, suddenly, a client commits a horrific act, and the film tumbles down a ravine of fear and uncertainty.
But isn’t that exactly what dating feels like now? A sometimes funny, petty, absurd, cruel, and dangerous pursuit, where the whittling down of a person to algorithmic data becomes yet another symptom of the capitalist disease. You could play a disastrously messy drinking game by taking a shot any time someone is referred to in terms of their “value”, or someone admits they’re only in a relationship because it makes them feel “valuable”.
It’s how Lucy calms down a bride with the jitters (her soon-to-be-husband makes her sister jealous), and how she initially describes her attraction to Harry: a man who is wealthy and tall and conveniently played by current go-to Hollywood hunk, Pedro Pascal. He is, in her words, “a unicorn”. The actor plays him with the kind of boundless graciousness that’s made him so popular off screen. He shakes hands with every guest at a party and turns up to a date with an entire planter of roses.
Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in ‘Materialists’ (A24)
And yet, the inevitable point of Materialists is that the maths don’t hold up in the face of Lucy’s ex, John (Chris Evans). He’s a struggling actor who’s lived in the same crusty flat for over a decade, with roommates who leave used condoms on the kitchen floor. That a woman might abandon the smart and comfortable for the reckless, instinctual pursuit of love is the bread-and-butter of the romcom. And yet it’s a formula that requires chemistry like we do oxygen, and Johnson and Evans don’t click in the same way as, say, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in The Notebook.
They fit their roles fine: her cool girl languor has always been appealing, and he’s the textbook charismatic grouch. But when Song made her heroine in Past Lives – Greta Lee’s Nora – a relative enigma, it suited the character’s tumultuous sense of identity. Here it just makes it hard to understand what Lucy and John actually talk about outside of money and relationships. Disappointingly, Materialists trusts that we’ll simply do the maths and all come up with the same answer.
Dir: Celine Song. Starring: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters, Marin Ireland. Cert 15, 117 minutes.
‘Materialists’ is in cinemas
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