“Materialists” Is a Thoughtful Romantic Drama That Doesn’t Quite Add Up

The work of the Korean Canadian filmmaker Celine Song is modest in scope and intimate in feel, but listen closely to her words—to say nothing of her silences—and you will hear whispers of a grand, even cosmic, ambition. “Past Lives,” her début feature, from 2023, was a small-scaled yet breathtakingly expansive tale of cultural and romantic confusion. The story skipped across countries and decades, leaping fluidly through time—twenty-four years backward, twelve years forward, and so on—with a quiet confidence in the bigger picture. The three main characters, modelled on Song, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, spoke of the Buddhist-derived concept of inyeon, which posits that love is not only fated but also perfected across centuries, through endless cycles of rebirth.

Now Song has written and directed a new film, “Materialists,” and it is, like “Past Lives,” a triangle without a villain. Nobody plots against anyone, but nobody invokes ancient proverbs, either. It unfolds in present-day New York, although there are two bookending scenes, set in prehistoric times, in which we see two cave dwellers embarking on an early human romance. Love, the film suggests, has always been a strategic, material affair, a matter of skillful hunting and gathering. Your ears perk up when, about forty minutes (and tens of thousands of years) later, one character admonishes another: “You say you think I’m smart, but you’re talking to me like I’m a caveman.” Coincidence? In Song’s movies, there’s no such thing.

The non-caveman is Harry, one of Manhattan’s most eligible bachelors. He’s addressing our protagonist, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a thirtysomething matchmaker for a high-end company called Adore, which offers relief to New Yorkers tired of swiping and liking. Lucy is trying to explain to Harry why the two of them are not an ideal fit: Harry is, in industry parlance, “a unicorn.” He is tall, handsome, and lethally charming—to put it another way, he’s played by Pedro Pascal—and he has a private-equity job and a twelve-million-dollar Tribeca penthouse. He can whisk the woman of his dreams off to Iceland at a moment’s notice. For him, Lucy is that woman, but she insists that he can do better.

Matchmaking has granted Lucy a coolly pragmatic, unsentimental view of love. It has also trained her to see women and men as human portfolios, no more than the sum of their physical and financial attributes. Some clients, such as the persistent, sympathetic Sophie (a terrifically brittle Zoë Winters), endure the indignities of the process in good faith, desperately submitting to one fruitless date after another. Others are far more demanding about what they want in a partner, and they shamelessly exaggerate their selling points to get it. Lucy, for her part, is ruthlessly honest about her own market value: she’s a college dropout and a failed actress who’s in debt and makes eighty grand a year. “The math doesn’t add up,” she tells Harry, who could easily find someone younger, richer, and altogether more suitable.

Harry, though, has a nice rejoinder: “I want to be with you for your intangible assets,” he purrs. A great actor, the cliché goes, can make the phone book riveting; Pascal hints at the untapped emotive possibilities of the balance sheet. Even Lucy, who wants to marry rich herself, cannot entirely resist Harry, his sexy down-to-earthness, his exquisite taste in mood lighting. No Johnson character has been this determinedly wined, dined, and swept off her feet since Anastasia Steele, the fresh-faced young heroine of “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015). Thankfully, unlike Christian Grey, Harry has zero interest in hanky-spanky. He may be a unicorn, but he has no need of a whip or a crop to take Lucy on the ride of her life.

But there is another, scruffier horse in the race: Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), who resurfaces the same night she first meets Harry. John, a cater waiter and an aspiring actor, has never gotten over Lucy, and she, too, retains more than a spark of affection for him, despite the financial pressures that ended their relationship some time ago. A flashback finds them stuck in a Times Square traffic snarl, arguing over a parking fee: “I don’t want to hate you because you’re poor,” Lucy wails. Once you get past the cognitive dissonance of seeing Madame Web dump Captain America, you realize that this isn’t just a breakup; it’s a breaking point, the moment when Lucy realizes and acknowledges that she cares more about money than love. It’s a major moment of disillusionment, but Song has another in store for her—one that might yet turn Lucy back into a hopeless, if not quite penniless, romantic. All she needs is a good, swift kick in the assets.

Song was a playwright before she turned to filmmaking, and much of her theatre work, which includes “Endlings” (2019) and the COVID-era virtual experiment “The Seagull on the Sims 4” (2020), revealed a healthy, interrogatory skepticism toward classical narrative forms. With “Materialists,” she dons the trappings of the Hollywood romantic comedy—a genre that has, regrettably, all but vanished from movie theatres—with both an affectionate embrace and a slight wrinkle of the nose, as if she didn’t entirely trust the goods she’s selling. And sure enough, the movie, like some of Lucy’s clients, turns out to be advertising one thing and peddling another. It often looks like a romantic comedy, thanks to the soft caress of sunlight in Shabier Kirchner’s images and the predominance of bubble-gum pink at Adore’s offices, where Lucy gets advice from a straight-talking boss (an excellent Marin Ireland). There are also not one but two gorgeous weddings—the first draped in wood-panelled midtown splendor, the second an upstate-barn-house affair—against which the characters’ romantic longings emerge in wistful relief.

But “Materialists” doesn’t much sound like a romantic comedy, at least not in the conventional sense. The featured songs, in keeping with Daniel Pemberton’s downbeat score, veer toward moody metropolitan rhapsody: Cat Power’s “Manhattan,” Harry Nilsson’s “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.” The characters may flirt coyly one moment and speak with heart-on-sleeve candor the next, but Song has excised any trace of screwball energy from the pacing and dialogue; here, as in “Past Lives,” she steers her principals toward bouts of languid self-reflection. A little of this goes a long way, and you crave a bit more comic vigor and snap. Only when Lucy and Harry spar over the economics of dating does the script approximate the sly, scintillating rhythm of banter.

From time to time, there are zippy montages of Adore clients, filling Lucy’s ears with ridiculous demands and impossibly narrow preferences, some of them cluelessly sexist, ageist, and racist. But the impulse behind these scenes feels less comedic than sociological. Song herself once worked as a matchmaker, and she is keen to expose two of the industry’s scourges: unabashed bigotry and, in one daring but poorly handled twist, sexual violence. You can appreciate Song’s refusal to shy away from the ugly realities of modern dating, and also her willingness to puncture rom-com illusions. But there’s something questionable about how the film deploys sexual assault as a plot device, with an ancillary character’s trauma as a way station on Lucy’s path to learning and romantic fulfillment.

It makes sense that Lucy, feeling guilty and demoralized, might reconsider her line of work. I have more trouble believing, as the movie’s second half suggests, that she would immediately relinquish her hard-won cynicism about romance, or her acute understanding of her own wants and needs. Johnson is skilled at playing both the sophisticate and the naïf, but she’s ill served by a story that insists on showing Lucy the error of her money-conscious ways. I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, “Materialists” trips up on its own high-mindedness.

Consider two key sequences, which scarcely seem to belong in the same movie, and which are all the more telling for their juxtaposition. In one, Harry brings Lucy home for the first time, and Lucy is clearly as turned on by his penthouse as she is by him. Kirchner’s slow-gliding camera, luxuriating in every inch of the space, is no less seduced. Compare that with our shaky first glimpse of John’s cramped apartment, which he shares with two slovenly roommates straight out of a Judd Apatow romp, and whose squalor the film can scarcely seem to tolerate for more than a minute. Song’s script may say one thing, but her filmmaking doesn’t lie.

The inequities of “Materialists” go well beyond real estate; they extend to Lucy’s suitors themselves. John is a starving-artist stereotype in search of a character, and Evans, always an appealingly angular and mischievous screen presence, is treated as little more than a hangdog hunk. But Harry, for all his designer Mr. Right vibes, seldom stops surprising you, and scene after magnetic scene leaves you wondering how Lucy, alleged math whiz, could be so stumped by this particular problem. “Materialists” is Pascal’s triangle, plain and simple. What other solution could there be? ♦