Celine Song’s Materialists Searches for Meaning

Celine Song has a knack for understated intimacy. In her movies, the noise and grime of city life are muted to a soft color palette and set to a slow, pensive score. Her characters are beautiful; their clothes aesthetically pleasing; the set design carefully composed. And the issues they deal with—lost love, careers, family dynamics, money—are thorny and complex, never overwhelming. But while Materialists has all the aesthetic qualities of Song’s debut, Past Lives, it’s missing the incisive observations that grounded its predecessor.

Song sets the stage once more with a trio of millennials and their sort-of love triangle. Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker in New York City, is preternaturally self-assured and poised. When she catches the eye of a man walking down the street at the start of the film, she turns his interest into a business pitch, handing him her card while saying she can help him find the love of his life. At Adore, the matchmaking firm she works at which seems to be populated entirely by blonde 20-somethings with at least 10K Instagram followers, Lucy celebrates her ninth wedding—that is, the ninth time her matches have resulted in marriage. 

It’s at that wedding that we meet the other sides of the triangle. Harry (Pedro Pascal), the groom’s wealthy older brother, starts to shoot his shot right when Lucy’s ex John (Chris Evans) appears, devastatingly handsome even in a cater-waiter uniform. It’s John who takes her home in his beat-up Volvo—where we get the backstory of the money troubles that caused the dissolution of their 5-year relationship—but it’s Harry who wins a date. As Lucy tries unsuccessfully to find the perfect match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters, who brings an emotional core to the movie), she finds her own aversion to romance worn down by Harry’s extravagant courtship. 

That courtship brings Lucy’s point of view to the forefront. Lucy terms Harry a “unicorn”—a man who somehow meets all the criteria she looks for in her field, from height and looks to salary and family background. Those checkboxes are central to Lucy’s work. When she first meets Harry, she compares being a matchmaker to being a mortician or an insurance broker: at the end of the day, you’re just dealing with the quantitative value of numbers and demographics. 

It’s relevant commentary in a time when dating feels almost gamified, with apps compressing people into a list of basic characteristics and interests. Love is easy and dating is the most difficult thing in the world, according to Lucy, and her line of work offers a solution. As Lucy, Johnson conveys her character’s whole-hearted belief in what she does and the categories she sorts people into—even to the point of asking Harry why he’s dating her when she’s objectively a “bad investment.” 

Lucy’s clients are another glimpse into the nightmare of modern dating. In a series of close-up shots, we meet an older man ready to date closer to his age—aka, 28-year-olds instead of 23-year-olds—and a white woman who tries to find a politically correct way of saying she’ll only date white men. It’s played for laughs, but like the rest of the movie, Song struggles to balance her real-life observations with levity. One wishes she’d leaned more Nora Ephron than Broadcast News. 

Midway through the film, Lucy’s worldview turns upside down after a client is assaulted on a date she set up. Off-puttingly, the assault is mostly just used as a narrative device to jumpstart Lucy’s character development and bring the other side of the love triangle into play. Where Harry meets Lucy on her playing field of relationships as business deals and long-term investments, John offers an emotional counterpoint to her pragmatism. Evans is as-ever a paramount rom-com love interest, delivering heated glances and romantic declarations with that beautiful face of his. 

But his believability as a potential love interest is almost in spite of, not due to, Song’s writing. She’s created a rom-com fantasy life for Lucy, where an $80,000 salary gets you a Vogue-approved wardrobe and an airy Manhattan apartment, and Harry and his $12 million loft and high-end restaurant dates make sense with Lucy’s stated preference for men with money. The contrast with John’s lifestyle is played a little too obviously—here reality crashes in with roommates, a struggling acting career, and simmering resentment over finances. And after spending much of its runtime outlining all the very real and practical reasons why Lucy and John’s relationship didn’t work, Materialists fails to address whether either of them have changed enough to make a next attempt successful.

While Lucy’s radical shift in perspective might make her more amenable to thinking with her heart and not her number-crunching brain, the movie seems to confuse materialism with values like ambition and stability. And if Song’s point is that love will find us all, economic barriers and financial realities be damned, Materialists doesn’t sell its logic.  

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