At first blush, Materialists looks like a typical romantic comedy, where an attractive single woman is forced to choose between two suitors.  Option A is the handsome, rich, older man she’s just met and could give her everything she wants.  Option B is a man closer to her age who’s scrapping by, but who she connects with because they were once in love.  Since both options are good–for different reasons–the fun is in waiting for the heroine to make her choice.  Although Materialists follows the same formula, Celine Song’s follow-up to her wonderful Past Lives aims higher.  It invites you to reflect upon your dating experiences and asks, how did you end up with the love of your life?

Materialists is about the practical matters surrounding dating, and the story is told from the perspective of a professional matchmaker, Lucy (Dakota Johnson).  She works for a dating service named Amour that brings professionally successful singles together.  Lucy ensures that the couples check each other’s boxes, or non-negotiable traits that are important to each other.  These include physical, background, education, work, politics, religion and so on.

While dating apps and services that reduce attraction down to algorithms would be cheaper alternatives, the people who employ Lucy have the means to hire someone to help them meet someone.  As one character succinctly puts it, Lucy is a luxury service.  The other advantage Lucy has over technology is intuition and empathy.  She can deduce when two people will click.  As proof, Lucy’s efforts have just resulted in her ninth client wedding, which warrants a celebration at her office.

As the person responsible for the happy union, Lucy is invited and goes stag.  As she tells a colleague, she only will date the man she will eventually marry.  As it just so happens, she runs into two prospects at the wedding.  One is Harry (Pedro Pascal), the brother of the groom.  He’s handsome, tall, wealthy, confident, charming and so on.  Although he works in private equity, it’s for his family’s firm.  As a prospective romantic partner, Harry checks all of Lucy’s boxes, or so it seems.

As the two chit-chat, another potential suitor shows up unexpectedly: John (Chris Evans), Lucy’s former boyfriend.  He’s an underemployed New York actor working for a catering company to make ends meet.  (Considering how many people like John there must be in the city, I wouldn’t be surprised to find they have their own dating app.)  Lucy greets him warmly and agrees to catch up later.  When she does, it’s obvious that Lucy and John still have that casual familiarity that only comes from being together for years.  John offers to give Lucy a ride home and she accepts, probably because she’s not ready to ride off with Harry just yet.  For his part, Harry is non-chalant about the competition, because he knows that he can offer a woman like Lucy more than John ever could, or so he thinks.

Harry proceeds to take Lucy out on a series of dates at expensive restaurants around town.  However, instead of conversations accentuated with simmering glances and sexy talk, the two size each other up like actuarial accountants.  Since Harry works in finance, he can also size up  potential romantic partners with the same math that Lucy can.  While Harry meets all of Lucy’s requirements, she’s unsure why Harry would be interested in her.  She’s not 25 but (gasp) 35, meaning that her looks and child-bearing years have an expiration date of ten years.  (Mentally, I noted that most 25 year-old women would kill to look as good as Johnson does in this movie.)

A befitting the movie’s “love is a business partnership” philosophy, Lucy and Harry agree to take their relationship to the next level.  (There’s a funny scene where Harry literally sweeps her off her feet, but she can’t help but be distracted by the opulence of his $12m apartment.)  For a while, everything appears to be going well for Lucy, but her life gradually becomes unsettled.  When Harry offers to take Lucy to her dream vacation destination of Iceland, she hesitates. Then her tough-luck client Sophie (Zoe Winters) has a very bad experience that affects her professionally and personally.

When Lucy calls John for a sympathetic ear, the feelings she once had for him resurface.  Could, or should, the two get back together?  And if they do, how would that work?  Do they still check each other’s boxes, or is love more than math?

Recommendation

So far this year, I’ve seen two romantic comedies, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.  Both hew faithfully to the romantic comedy conventions, even when they use those conventions in different ways.  Although Materialists adopts the structure of a romantic comedy, it’s actually a thoughtful consideration of the practical matters of dating and falling in love.  It’s an engaging subversion of genre expectations that asks you to think instead of being carried along on emotions.

I don’t recall another movie that discusses love and dating as seriously as this one.  Materialists is genuinely curious about the “math” of compatibility and how it results in love–or not.  Writer-director Celine Song approaches the material with a refreshing degree of inquisitiveness and maturity, something that rom-coms aren’t known for.  And while I enjoyed the frank dialog, there’s a noticeable absence of passion throughout.

As someone who enjoyed Song’s Past Lives, a movie brimming with passion, Materialists comes off as thought exercise in comparison.  It talks a lot about love but holds off on delivering until the very end.  Fortunately, the ending is amazing in the raw emotions and pure honesty it conveys.  Until that point, the movie deliberately keeps passion at arms-length, talking a good game before it finally delivers.

The three leads in this film give exceptional performances, maybe among the best of their careers.  Dakota Johnson is known more for her few bad films (Fifty Shades, Madam Web) than what consensus tells me are her good ones.  Her dreamy and detached acting style is a perfect fit for a successful matchmaker, someone who is beautiful, talks about love matter-of-factly while somehow remaining above the fray.

As the men trying to win Johnson’s affections, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal get to show sides of themselves that I’ve never seen before.  Evans employs a convincing mix of brooding intensity, devotion and self-deprecating humor that makes me wonder why he’s only found success as Captain America.  Pascal’s role hearkens back to a time movies seem to have forgotten, before television shows like Mad Men and Succession portrayed captains of industry as monsters.  I liken Pascal’s performance to Harrison Ford’s turn in Working Girl, in how it showcases his handsomeness, charm and playful sense of humor without a hint of irony.  Although I didn’t buy how his character arc was resolved, I liked his character every moment he was on screen.

Materialists is a surprisingly cerebral reworking of the romantic comedy genre that’s more interested in having philosophical conversations about love rather than meeting our expectations.  Rest assured, it provides just enough romance and laughs to satisfy the faithful.  Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans are pitch-perfect as the handsome and mature love triangle.  Recommended.

Analysis

“Why do fools fall in love?”

Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers

Materialists ponders this question considerably but never conclusively answers it.  In the beginning, the movie depicts two cave-people performing a ritual it later clarifies as the first marriage in human history.  But how and why did they fall in love in the first place?  That mystery lies at the heart of the story and fuels its curiosity.  Why does love happen for these two people but not those two people, even when the latter were a perfect match for each other?

Materialists offers up two conflicting answers.  The first is that love is a matter of compatibility.  If two people have enough in common, and have traits that are appealing to the other, then love can emerge when they’re put together.  This is what happened with nine of Lucy’s clients.  She did the math, set two people up on dates and they fell in love.  Dating services and matchmakers like Lucy have been doing math for centuries.  Sometimes it works, but more often than not it doesn’t.  Although Harry’s brother found his soul mate going the matchmaker route, Harry did not.  Although it initially appears that math failed Lucy and Harry, that’s not the conclusion the movie wants us to make.

You can’t ignore math

When Lucy is getting to know Harry, she tells him that she will only date the man she will marry.  She also states that her ideal partner must be rich.  As I mentioned above, Harry is not only rich, but ideal in almost every conceivable way.  Harry checks all of Lucy’s boxes, so she should be thrilled that he plans to propose to her on their Icelandic vacation.  However, Lucy is distressed over that possibility.  Her uncertainties about marrying Harry begin with a curious scar on  Harry’s leg, which force him to reveal something incredibly personal about himself.  However, Lucy’s decision to end her relationship with Harry isn’t because of the scar, but because she ignored her own math.

All along, Lucy’s soul mate has been John.  He checks all of Lucy’s boxes, except for being wealthy.  They are around the same age, handsome, come from poor backgrounds and have struggled to get where they are.  When Lucy broke things off with John, it was because of his lack of money.  She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life squabbling over money like her parents and decided to end things.  And while she was able to become successful on her own, it didn’t change the fact that John was the only man who she ever loved.  This is what makes their reconciliation at the end of the movie so emotionally powerful.  The most important box for Lucy has always been love, not money.  John can only promise her love, so according to compatibility math, they are the perfect match for each other.  When Lucy realizes this, she accepts John’s proposal because it’s the right one for her.

The mysterious Harry

The other mystery within the movie is why Harry pursues Lucy.  She’s fully aware that Harry can attract women ten years younger than her that can give him what he wants.  But Harry insists that he doesn’t want younger women, only Lucy.  She’s beautiful, accomplished, has excellent taste and many other positives.  But what drives Harry’s pursuit of her isn’t clear until the source of his leg scar is revealed.

When Harry revealed that he underwent height-altering surgery, I understood why he was so intent upon pursuing Lucy and eventually marrying her.  When he was 5’ 6”, he lacked the confidence to approach a woman like Lucy.  (Johnson is 5’ 7”, but probably 5’ 10” in heels.)   However, at 6’ tall, he could command other people’s attention.  As a taller man, people at work respected him more.  That newfound respect gave him the confidence to try to win over a self-professed unobtainable woman like Lucy.  In business terminology, Lucy would be a prize acquisition at the end of a hard-fought merger.

Unfortunately for Harry, there’s more to love than checking someone else’s boxes.  Even though he can give Lucy everything she wants, she doesn’t love him.  And, in one of the movie’s brilliantly candid moments, he admits that he doesn’t love her, either.  Even though each of them meet each other’s requirements, their combined math scores don’t produce love.  Harry’s frustration over how difficult love is for him is understandable.  He can give any woman anything they want, but it won’t make a woman love him, and vice versa.  Love is never easy for him, probably because he doesn’t know what he wants in a partner.  It’s also why Lucy winds up back with John.  Being with John is easy for her.  They’re meant to be together, even if there will be future arguments over $20 parking spaces downtown.

Sometimes, life isn’t fair

The movie’s sole hanging thread is Sophie.  Song raises some challenging questions with her character that she fails to resolve.  Sophie is attractive and accomplished, hardly old at thirty-nine, so why does love continue to elude her?  Why is she the one who goes on date after date, only to be consistently rejected?  Why is she one of the unlucky ones to go out with a psycho?  Is the simple answer that she is fated to a life of disappointment?  If Song ever makes a sequel to this movie, I hope she addresses these questions surrounding Sophie.

Where’s the passion?

For a movie about love, it’s nearly passion-free until the penultimate scene between Lucy and John.  Song’s decision to have Materialists unfold this way was curious to me, given how much passion infused her previous movie, Past Lives.

For example, when Lucy dumped Harry because their relationship didn’t have a spark, I was waiting for Harry to finally unleash the passion I’d assumed he’d kept bottled up.  If he made a big emotional gesture, there was a chance Lucy could have changed her mind.  But no, Harry agrees that he doesn’t love her either, sheepishly admits to having height-lengthening surgery and then performs a sight gag.  See how short I was before you met me?  Ha, ha!

As I stated above, I have no strong objections to how Song decided to frame this story.  It’s refreshing to listen to people talking openly about dating and love instead of wading through a steady stream of jokes until true love is acknowledged.  What surprised me about Materialists was how deliberately Song keeps passion out of the story until the very end.

Song’s Past Lives is one of my favorite films from 2023, mainly for how its characters exude passion throughout.  These are people whose lives are defined by passion, past and present.  Although Past Lives ends on a sad note, it’s very clear as to why that result is tragic.  The strength of Nora and Hae’s feelings for each other is never in doubt.  So when they both decide to relinquish their hold on the other, it hits hard because the passion between them is undeniable.

With Materialists, Song’s characters are practical, realistic and cynical, but rarely passionate.  The film examines love from many angles except passion, which it briefly describes as a spark that two people either have or not.  Instead of fully exploring love and passion, it defers until the moment of truth arrives.

If I were to describe Song’s Past Lives and Materialists, I would say she painted with one set of colors with the first one, then chose a completely different set for the second one.  While I’ve enjoyed both of her films, I feel that her best film will be a combination of the two, a story that is about the mystical (and mystifying) aspects of love and the logical, math-driven side of it.  Whether this happens with her third film or her thirtieth, I’ll keep watching until she gets there.