I loved Past Lives, the first feature from writer-director Celine Song, which more than deserved its Best Picture nomination and should have nabbed one for its start Greta Lee, for the depth of its story, its beautiful yet spare dialogue, and its deep understanding of the complex feelings we experience while in love or moving beyond it. Song’s follow-up, Materialists, has some similarly strong dialogue and flashes some of the same emotional intelligence as the prior film, but this time the script goes nowhere and the lead character’s journey is hard to accept because she herself is just not credible. (It’s streaming on HBO Max and available to rent on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)
Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker in New York City, and very good at her job; as the film opens, she accosts a handsome middle-aged man in a suit on the street, asks if he’s single, and gives him her card. She’s just reached her ninth wedding, although she’s struggling to find a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), whose bad luck with men – with men being men, specifically – seems to be the one thing about the job that triggers an actual feeling in Lucy. While at her ninth client wedding, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a charming, obscenely rich, well-dressed single guy. Lucy takes an interest in Harry as a potential client, while Harry takes an interest in Lucy, period. By sheer coincidence, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor, happens to be working as a server at the same wedding, which puts the two of them back in touch. Harry and Lucy begin dating, as he sweeps her off her feet with meals at exclusive Manhattan restaurants – including a real $950/person omakase bar that has since closed – and they have long, thoughtful conversations on the real meaning of marriage. Is it merely a business transaction? Does love need to be a part of it? Is there real meaning in Lucy’s job? Of course, John is Chekhov’s gun, here, and when something goes very wrong at work, he’s the one Lucy calls, not Harry, setting up a denouement where she has to choose between the handsome rich guy and the handsome poor guy.
Lucy is just not a compelling central character. She is not very complex; she talks endlessly of “checking boxes” and seems to want to reduce everyone and every relationship to a matter of data. (I suppose you could argue she is just the matchmaking world’s version of sports analytics.) She ended her five-year relationship with John because they were broke and constantly arguing about it, and she wanted some of the finer things in life. Then she spends a good bit of her time with Pedro saying that she’s not a good enough match for him, implying that he should be her client rather than her boyfriend, which doesn’t even seem to add up in her version of math – all three of these people are very good-looking, and Lucy is gainfully employed, making enough money to afford her own apartment in New York City. She and Harry seem like they’d be a perfect match, not just in the sense of a coherent narrative, but in the sense of how Lucy views relationships and marriage in the first place. To have her suddenly break out into the chorus of “Seasons of Love” at the end of the movie (figuratively) makes no sense whatsoever, and Johnson is such a stolid actor that she can’t express Lucy’s joy or sadness or possible love for John well enough to make either of them believable.
There are also multiple twists in the movie that it didn’t need, including Lucy’s work subplot and a secret Harry has been hiding that refers back to something earlier in the film but adds up to nothing at all other than giving Pascal a chance to do something extremely charming for a moment in his $12 million condo’s kitchen. The plot seems forced as a result, as if those twists had to happen to propel anything here forward, such as setting up a reason for Lucy to reconnect further with John than she had after they ran into each other at the wedding.
I’ve seen Materialists pitched as a comedy or rom-com – Wikipedia’s entry calls it a “romantic comedy drama film,” which are words – but if that was the intention, it failed. Materialists is never funny. It might be too serious at points, but it is never frivolous. There are no jokes or gags, running or sitting still or standing in the corner or anywhere else. The closest this comes to humor is when we see male clients of Lucy’s detailing their insane demands for dates, including the 47-year-old who won’t date a woman over 29, but it’s not that comical when it’s just mirroring reality. It didn’t need to be funny, so I can’t hold this against the movie, but anyone who has called Materialists a comedy lacks a sense of humor badly enough to live in the comments on BlueSky. It could have been Song’s attempt to deconstruct the rom-com, or invert it, but the ending is far too traditional, to the point of cliché, for that to be the case. Materialists has some very strong moments hidden within it – Harry and Lucy’s conversation in the Italian restaurant stands out – but ultimately doesn’t reach the heights of Past Lives.