'Materialists' Review: Love Isn't All You Need in Celine Song's Latest
The Dakota Johnson-starring love triangle movie fails to strike the right chords to make a connection
We open in nature, with two Indigenous people clad in animal skins wordlessly engaging with each other. Wait, they don’t look like the three Materialists leads? Am I in the right movie? Don’t worry, you are. It’s meant to set the tone for writer/director Celine Song’s throughline: that people have been taking the leap to get married since time immemorial. It’s also a jarring opening that situates the rather jarring divergences Materialists takes throughout its near-two hour runtime that will leave you scratching your head. After coming out of the gate with her 2023 feature Past Lives—another movie with a romantic love triangle at its center—Song’s follow-up movie can’t help but feel like a sophomore slump with its clunky tone and narrative detours that detract from what works so well about love triangle movies: trying to debate and argue where the heroine should be with.
Materialists is less a love triangle and more about one indecisive New York matchmaker. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) appears to have it all. She’s successfully helped nine couples find love and matrimony, even if they try to waffle out of it at the last minute. She has a great apartment (in NYC, let me remind you) and stellar wardrobe. She also plans to marry rich or die alone. When she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a unicorn who checks off every box in the Prince Charming playbook, Lucy believes she’s hit the jackpot. But when her ex John (Chris Evans) returns to her life Lucy starts to wonder if she’s no longer a material girl.
Song makes her point immediately: during the cave man times, things like animal horns, knives and flowers (plus a healthy dose of love) was more than enough to secure a happy and advantageous marriage. Not so in the wilds of today where Lucy hears men nearing 50 refusing to date anyone under the age of 30 and women demanding a man who makes six figures and is over six feet (“Six feet can double a man’s value,” as Lucy explains). Lucy spends her days wrapped up in a world where romance is nice to have but it’s far from a non-negotiable. As Lucy heavy-handedly explains, so many times it becomes annoying, marriage is little more than a business merger, with each person bringing in certain things as a dowry to create worth.
Materialists definitely lives up to its title and that makes the whole movie a bit cold and formalistic. We’re introduced to a cool, well-dressed career woman in Lucy who, not unlike Jennifer Lopez’s character in The Wedding Planner, does everything from talking brides off a ledge to hyping the concept of matchmaking to the bride’s friends as finding a “nursing home partner and a grave buddy.” But, in Johnson’s hand dare we say materialism isn’t particularly interesting? Johnson has the coolness down but there’s little warmth or depth to her performance as Lucy. She exudes little chemistry opposite Pascal, though that’s justified through the narrative, but there’s just as little opposite Evans, a man she presumably loved for five years.
Lucy’s relationship with John sees far more development, and by development it’s just more scenes. The lone flashback to their dynamic sees the couple arguing in the street—in an NYC where no one is threatening to run them over—over the key facets that define Lucy and John. She hates that he’s broke (and arguing about money reminds her of her parents) while he hates that she hates that he’s broke. Evans, at 43, is hard to buy as a self-proclaimed 37-year-old busboy who dreams of being an actor and still lives with three roommates. Despite his supposed love for Lucy, and his awareness of her desire for a man with money (or at least someone headed in that direction) he’s seemingly had no interest in actively changing his life. The script doesn’t lay out the why’s behind anyone’s history so when John sees Lucy again and proclaims his love the audience questions what he’s done to actually make himself worthy of her.
The script also treats everything with a similar surface level. There’s a lot of comparison that could be drawn between this and the work of Whit Stillman in the sardonic dialogue and the blending of the melancholic with the privileged. But this doesn’t have the same verve as a Frances Ha or a Metropolitan. It’s hard to particularly care who Lucy ends up with, though it’s known from minute one—both because of the backstory and just the formula of these movies—who she’ll end up with. But since the script knows that it doesn’t give audiences much of a choice or even a desire to give Lucy romantic conflict. Pascal’s Harry is charismatic, charming, funny, and essentially all the reasons we love Pedro Pascal. This self-awareness is probably why the movie doesn’t spend any significant time between the couple, short of a few spliced together dates and love scenes. It’s as if the hope is that if we don’t get a ton of Pascal we won’t want him to win. In this instance, Madonna’s claim about the guy with the cold hard cash IS Mr. Right.
The one thing Johnson gets right with Lucy is how unable she is to make a decision. There’s not necessarily a feeling that the characters grow throughout the narrative but that they just decide to give up, to settle, the things Lucy has been desperate to avoid. And it’s not a “surrender to love” type of thing but comes off like a “surrender because this is about as good as you’ll ever get.” Lucy’s decision isn’t between John or Harry, but a decision to not decide anything at all.
Then again, the script can’t seem to decide either as sandwiched in between the love triangle is a rather ham-fisted subplot wherein a client of Lucy’s is sexually assaulted by a man Lucy matched her with. It comes from out of nowhere and adds in a heaping dose of not only reality but clashes with nearly everything that’s laid out. A third act moment wherein Lucy and John have to potentially save the client from the rapist—who refuses to leave her alone—is just so confusing and leads absolutely nowhere.
Materialists is as shallow as its characters, but so desperately wants to think it isn’t. The script is all over the place, and when it finally settles into a groove there still seems to be pieces missing. Johnson falls flat while Evans tries his utmost to charm. The MVP is Pedro Pascal, though he’s underutilized and set up as a second banana in the Ralph Bellamy mode for reasons that just seem mean. This ain’t gonna make anyone’s rainy day (last Madonna reference).