“You are going to marry the love of your life.” This is what Lucy, the professional matchmaker, promises her high-end clients in writer-director Celine Song’s flawed but often enthralling “Materialists.” Lucy works for a ritzy company aptly named Adore and has just brokered her ninth client wedding. She is also single and celibate, and regards marriage as a cost-benefit proposition.
Is Lucy, superbly played by Dakota Johnson, a hypocrite? Not exactly. She believes in love; it’s just that, for her, the math doesn’t add up. Years before, she halfheartedly tried being an actor. She broke up with her struggling actor boyfriend John (an excellent Chris Evans) because he couldn’t afford to give her the life she wanted. The steeliness that Lucy exudes, despite her almost demure exterior, is her emotional armor.
If you’ve seen the trailer for this film, you might mistake it for a Nora Ephron-esque rom-com. But it’s trying, not always effectively, to be more subversive than that. Like its heroine, the movie has a divided soul. It wants to be a hard-edged examination of modern love while at the same time incorporating many of the generic rom-com tropes.
Why We Wrote This
Writer-director Celine Song’s follow-up to her Oscar-nominated “Past Lives” is another film that focuses on the nature of love. “Materialists,” our critic observers, poses the question, What kind of life do its people deserve?
And so Lucy finds herself positioned between two lovers. She is being wooed by Pedro Pascal’s Harry, a handsome, smitten professional with his own Manhattan penthouse who actually listens to her when she talks. She also crosses paths once again with John, still a struggling actor, and still in love with her. He works as a server and lives in a crummy Brooklyn apartment with two slobby roommates.
Song’s debut feature, the marvelous “Past Lives,” also featured a New York career woman emotionally drawn to two men, her husband and a childhood sweetheart visiting from South Korea. But there was no question in that film that such a thing as true love exists. It was only a question of whom that love should be bestowed upon.
“Materialists” bears a superficial resemblance to “Past Lives,” but it’s not really a love triangle, since love doesn’t play a part in Lucy’s calculations with Harry. It’s clear that whatever she knows of true romance came from John. And yet, despite his doting, he doesn’t make her feel valuable.
It’s a tribute to Johnson’s performance that Lucy comes across as more of a realist than a cynic. She’s successful at her career because she accepts the commodified rules of modern elite courtship. Her clients are quite specific about what they are looking for in age, height, bank account, body mass index, etc. She routinely compares what she does to being an insurance adjuster, but she also recognizes that her people divulge intimacies they would never reveal even to their therapist. And she is not insincere in attempting to bolster her clients’ self-worth. She connects to the vulnerability beneath their bluster.
When a favorite client, the oft-turned-down Sophie (Zoe Winters, in a startling cameo) encounters a match that turns dark, Lucy is inconsolable. Sophie’s accusatory anger toward her tears her apart. She wants to quit her job, not realizing that sexual predation in her line of work comes with the territory. Lucy may seem wised-up when she tells Harry she’s “materialistic” and “not a good person,” but in many ways she’s naive to the ways of the world.
Some reservations: Song plays out the scenes between Lucy and Harry, and between Lucy and John, as two-way dialogues that are often stagy and too on-the-nose. She once worked as a professional matchmaker before becoming a celebrated playwright, but the frantic scenes inside the Adore offices don’t ring true. It may also be a bit of a stretch to believe Lucy, as played by the incandescent Johnson, could ever be a celibate single. The film’s conventional close-out diminishes the complexity that came before. And the framing device involving prehistoric cave dwellers should have been left on the cutting room floor.
Despite all this, “Materialists” scores where it counts most. Jane Austen it’s not, but it gets at the consequences of modern romance among the moneyed classes, where self-worth is bound up in one’s market value. The film implicitly poses the question, What kind of life do its people deserve? There’s a measure of hope and sympathy in the offering.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Materialists” is rated R for language and brief sexual material.
