Materialists

In telling the story of a matchmaker, Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), torn between two suitors, the wealthy financier Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), and the poor actor with a catering gig on the side, John Pitts (Chris Evans), writer/director Celine Song wants to create a modern update on the class-conscious romantic comedies of the 1930s and 40s. And fair enough. Save for a few ham-fisted attempts at humor involving John’s roommate situation, however, “Materialists” isn’t really funny, or even trying to be funny, or even trying to be arch, as the set-up might have suggested. No, Song takes her ideas seriously, which isn’t a bad thing, and sometimes proves quite good, though her notions of the present-day economic divide in America can’t help but come across glib. At one point, Lucy confesses her salary to be $80k before taxes and, well, renting a Brooklyn apartment all to herself, not to mention maintaining that haircut and wardrobe week-in and week-out, on that salary might honestly be the funniest thing in the whole unfunny movie. 

Lucy’s matchmaker profession instantly evokes romance as a business. Indeed, she meets Harry, and re-encounters John, at a wedding for a client. Harry overhears her mid-business pitch, and when he tries to ask her out on a date, she comes across more interested in signing him up as a client, eventually relenting to a relationship in the face of his charm offensive. Even so, every conversation they have is born less of sweet nothings than practicalities, what each person offers the other, etc., as if they are dealmakers hashing out details, underlined in how Song tends to shoot these scenes in two shots that render so many swanky locales as boardrooms. Even Lucy’s discussions with John, trying to win her heart all over again, involve the details of real life, his lack of material world usefulness. These scenes are fascinating, and in them, the dialogue assumes a captivating kind of hyper-formality, one that impeccably meshes with Johnson’s oft-impassive acting style.

At times, Song appears to be attempting to deconstruct the rom com itself, like she watched “Hitch” one night and wanted to pick apart its rigidly structured sentimentality like a frog. Yet, in the end she becomes as reliant on formula as any regular old rom com. She might tack on a sexual assault subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients (Louisa Jacobson), and though she at least lets the victim have the final word, the whole thing still chiefly and insultingly exists to spur Lucy toward her own self-realization. What’s more, Song never really sees any of this trio as real people; they hardly exist outside the notion of their swirling relationships. The closest we get is a brief snippet of John acting in a play, but even then, we learn next to nothing about what drew him to the stage in the first place. Who they are beyond their socioeconomic status is irrelevant. That might not have been so bad had Song followed the transactional nature of relationships to the end, but ultimately, she wants the characters to overcome it, which is hard to do when they aren’t really characters at all but mere stand-ins.