Does Materialists Save The Romcom?
I had low expectations of Materialists. Thanks to a maddening schedule that withheld its UK release until two months after the US had already digested it, I was aware of the indifferent response from both critics and box office. This came despite the film being the follow-up to Celine Song‘s widely revered Past Lives, and a marketing campaign that led to frenzied shouts of ‘we’re so back’ by those nostalgic for the golden age of romcoms. Are we back? Not all the way, but this is a refreshingly serious take on the genre.
Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, an ace high-end matchmaker for wealthy singletons in New York. She’s on a hot streak, and attends a wedding of two of her clients she had set up, as much for support as for scouting – these celebrations are recruitment goldmines. The wedding is lavish, but deliberately almost liminal in its homogeneity. Straight, lily-white (both the dress and attendees), Sweet Caroline belting out, and a generic speech from the father, “When you’re lost… the answer is simple. Just go where love is”.
When her client – the bride – gets skittish as the material splendour of her own wedding triggers an existential crisis, Lucy reassures her. Not by dismissing these fears but by normalising them, emphasising to her client that ‘every marriage is a business transaction’ and reminding her that she’s about to make a very good one, setting out the movie’s cynical outlook on modern dating.
It’s here she meets Pedro Pascal’s Harry, who she describes as a ‘unicorn’, the rare breed in her industry who is a ‘10/10 in every category’. That’s looks, income, education, height, upbringing. But, like an inverse Jay-Z, he finds love ‘the most difficult thing in the world’. She tries to recruit him, but he has her in his sights, seeing someone who shares his pragmatism in recognising the potential upside of their burgeoning partnership.
But she also runs into her ex, John (Chris Evans). Rather than a private equity friend of the groom, he’s there as a cater-waiter to save up cash before performing in a budget off-off-Broadway play. We learn, through a heavy-handed flashback that could have used even an ounce of show-don’t-tell, that they broke up not because they drifted apart, but because he was broke. From here, Materialists feels like two separate films in one. There’s one that works, a genuine interrogation of modern dating seen through the eyes of a high-end professional matchmaker, and one that falls flat, following her own love triangle.
Materialists feels like two separate films in one; one that works, and one that falls flat
It’s not helped by the cast. Johnson and Pascal, in particular, feel like they’re acting in two dimensions. While good as someone who gradually becomes alienated from her job as a professional manipulator, and growingly bewildered with just how candid her clients can be (‘they wouldn’t admit this to their therapist’), Johnson struggles to sell the central romantic and emotional quandary her character faces. She’s not helped by a complete lack of chemistry with Pascal, who starts promisingly as a suave finance bro with substance, turns into a vacuum by the middle, and is almost all but forgotten by the end, save for one genuinely great reveal Emerald Fennell is probably frantically emailing her lawyers to see if she can retroactively steal for shock value. Instead, to a much more impactful end, it’s played in a tone of quiet desperation and openness about how important superficiality actually is.
But it has considerable strengths. The com element is mostly provided by Lucy’s needy, cynical clients, who demand their male partners to be millionaires with good hairlines, and in their female partners, an inappropriate age gap. Song herself spent six months as a matchmaker, and these scenes feel like shrewd depictions of what she felt her clients may have been trying to tell her in a roundabout way. One scene, where Johnson unloads at a client while staring down the camera, is pure wish fulfilment on Song’s part. She may be cynical about modern dating, but she’s a fully fledged romantic. The film’s argument is not that the material things don’t matter, that dating checkboxes aren’t useful, but that love is a nebulous thing you ultimately can’t really predict or control.
The romcom genre can often be as unrealistic as Sci-Fi. There’s no time for questions of the financial burden of protagonists, convenience or any vague sense of realism – we’ve got a dream to sell, you can hear studio execs say. One of Materialists great strengths is its specificity. We know Dakota Johnson’s salary, how much Chris Evans has in the bank account, and how much Pedro Pascal’s penthouse costs ($12m). These are not abstract numbers; the prices are picked deliberately. Pascal’s Harry is wealthy, yes, but decidedly not a billionaire. In an interview with the Guardian, Song notes, “I think because of how visible billionaires are, we think that’s what wealth is. And I’m like: no, that’s just crime”. For the most part, it tries to be realistic, apart from John’s refusal to accept the easy path to financial security (becoming a Head & Shoulders model).
Verdict
Song may be cynical about modern dating, but she’s a fully fledged romantic
Materialists is much more rom than com, but what it does have going for it, and separates it from many other attempts at genre revival that try to capitalise on selling aspiration, escapism and fantasy, is that it takes the genre seriously. It interrogates it; it’s interested in how romance intersects with other facets of life, like capitalism and politics. It’s both cynical and hopeful, albeit a much better film when it’s cynical.
