When people say they want to make a James L. Brooks comedy, they usually know that they’re going to attempt something difficult but they never seem to gather that it’s actually impossible. One must consider that even Brooks himself has been failing to really capture that magic since As Good As It Gets, and that movie is nearly thirty years old. His 1987 film Broadcast News is the pinnacle of the love triangle romantic comedy, and Celine Song is trying to channel that in her latest film, Materialists. This is Song’s second feature, after her masterful (and successful) debut, Past Lives, in 2023. Past Lives was a languid, personal film about growth and love, and how the two can be at odds with one another. Materialists shows a jump in budget, but it also shows a shift into a more commercial arena.
The film’s distributor, A24, has certainly marketed Materialists as a throwback romantic comedy. The truth is that, tonally at least, this film is closer to the indie aesthetic of Past Lives than they want you to know. There’s a woman at the center, played by Dakota Johnson, and she finds herself thrust into a choice between one man who represents the impracticality of romantic love and another who can supply the capital to make a comfortable life. It’s not quite the same love triangle from her first film, but as a viewer you can certainly notice a pattern. The autobiographical connections that Song had to Past Lives showed in that film’s aching romance. Materialists is a stab at making something less specific, broader in scope. One forgets that it’s usually the most personal stories that can end up being the most universal.
Johnson plays Lucy, a professional matchmaker living in New York City. Her company, Adore, handles high-end clientele within Manhattan who have high (nay, extreme) expectations. All the women want height, a high salary, a dependable hairline, at least a semblance of romance. In a way, the men are simpler, if much more shameless: they want women half their age with a perfect physique. After her ninth client gets married, Lucy is the star matchmaker at Adore, with such stellar client relationships that she’s even getting invited to the wedding. It’s there where she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the old money brother of the groom who watches Lucy pontificate on her theories of love. Harry admires her confidence and her competence, and approaches her during the reception to see if that translates into her own personal life.
At the same wedding, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans). A struggling actor whose consistent financial impropriety led to their break-up years ago, John is working as a caterer at the wedding. This is the perfect kind of Hollywood movie set-up: finding an exciting new partner just as you’re being re-introduced to an old one. Materialists leans into this traditional storytelling approach, and wants you to draw comparisons to other major studio romances of the 80s and 90s. What unfolds is something a little more complicated. Often the film debates the very possibility of modern romance at all. Harry represents a “unicorn” in Lucy’s business, a man with financial stability and good looks who’s not superficial. He’s the pragmatic choice for a single woman in her mid-30’s. But John represents the warts-and-all love that her business promises to foster.
Song is routinely showing us scenes of very frank, almost despairing, talk about contemporary dating and modern romance. The picture isn’t pretty. Their pay grade is high and so are their standards. Men and women are dismissed for the shallowest reasons, and discussed like cattle. Probably important to note that Adore seems to exclusively deal in cisgender, heterosexual relationships (with the exception of one MAGA lesbian), and even that choice feels intentional in its antiquated view on what makes a relationship work. Lucy can toggle back and forth. She can play a romantic, stressing the existence of soul mates, and the ease of finding the right match (“Love is easy, dating is hard”). She also has the perfect script for the cynical, transactional crowd: since its inception, marriage has always been a business deal, and if the deal is bad, you’re welcome to walk away.
The scenes in which Lucy is doing her job are the best in the movie. They possess Song’s best writing, popping with brutal humor and uncomfortable truths. The love triangle outside of that isn’t nearly as compelling. Dakota Johnson’s careless affect is perfect for when Lucy is in matchmaking cypher mode, but less effective when she’s managing the complexities of her own personal hangups. Harry’s seduction of her feels perfunctory, and his character’s lack of any meaningful flaws makes it hard to root in either direction. Pascal is serviceable in the part but you can see him struggling to tread water with such flimsy material. And here’s the fatal flaw: the film does ultimately feel out of touch with a working class audience. Lucy’s own materialism stems from her poor background, but we never get any real details, and it’s hard to buy nepo-baby Johnson as anyone who’s had to live in poverty.
Of the three leads, the actor who seems most comfortable within the romance is Chris Evans. Evans may seem overqualified to play a broke loser living with roommates in the boroughs, but his performance calls to mind many actual struggling actors who populate the most desperate corners of New York, who cling to the world’s most expensive city in romantic devotion to their dream. Since Evans’s great performance in Ryan Johnson’s 2019 film Knives Out, he has been wandering the wilderness of Hollywood, starring in films that can only be described as “catastrophically bad” (The Gray Man and Ghosted rank amongst the worst films I’ve ever seen). But I always knew that Evans was better than that material, which is what made it so tragic. So I’ll give Materialists credit for reminding us that Evans is capable of something real and good.
Lucy, and the film itself, struggle to reconcile how real romantic love is in the current world. Song’s script waffles so much that by the end, when you think the movie has made a decision, there’s skepticism. There are so many dialogue sequences that showcase Song’s excellent ability to conjure honest human emotion, but Materialists also feels much more like it’s directed by a playwright than Past Lives ever did. It has a commitment to the words over what makes sense dramatically, and it makes sense, because oftentimes the words are so good. But this script overall is uneven. The love triangle doesn’t always fit so seamlessly into the larger tale of matchmaking. Like Celine Song, I am also a child of the 90s, and have that nostalgic pang for the romantic comedies of my childhood. The movies could use them and it seems a wasted commercial resource that they’ve been discarded, but Materialists‘s tone is too somber and unconvinced. Which makes it unconvincing for the audience as well.
Written and Directed by Celine Song