Review: Celia Song’s Materialists is All Charm, Little Depth
Dakota Johnson bravely chooses between two 10s as a matchmaker who makes her own match in the engaging rom-com Materialists.
Dating in these times is not for the faint at heart. Some singles are out here playing games of sexual catch-and-release, while others, according to Celia Song’s astute romance Materialists, have reduced relationships to X’s and O’s, concerned less with love than with checking off boxes.
Age, height, income, education, family background, future potential earnings, and, of course, attractiveness are the key measurements for the movie’s modern daters seeking the help of Manhattan matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson) to find a mate.
Each of Lucy’s clients has their own combination of key requirements they hope will unlock the perfect match. Yet, they all want to be set up with someone who’s their version of a ten out of ten in every category.
Writer-director Song — Oscar-nominated for the original screenplay of her absorbing soul-mate drama Past Lives — offers here a pointedly pragmatic view of romance.
Shifting smoothly between skewering these high-achieving, transactional daters, and sympathizing with their pain and loneliness, the film frequently underscores the cynicism of Lucy’s clientele by simply letting them state, direct-to-camera, what they’re seeking.
The quick, reliably funny montages of shallow men seeking shallower women, and determined women seeking the impossibly ideal man punctuate the movie’s main events in Lucy’s suddenly busy love life.
Like her clients — or perhaps even more so — she also has reduced dating to boring math, and isn’t even looking for anyone to measure against her requirements when, unexpectedly, she’s handed an embarrassment of riches in boyfriend material. Somehow she’ll have to choose between her kind-hearted working-class ex, John (Chris Evans), and confident, dashing millionaire, Harry (Pedro Pascal), without suffering too much in the process.
Frankly, she doesn’t suffer too much, as Song doesn’t dare enough to let Lucy’s love triangle get truly messy or complicated. Outside of a well-placed, tightly edited flashback to Lucy and John’s days as a couple, perfectly distilling in one argument how they wound up exes, the script rarely scratches down to the raw, open, sometimes ugly center of its three central characters, remaining near the surface of their pretty, professional lives.
That is, except for struggling theater actor John. He’s the most like a regular guy that erstwhile cinema superhero Chris Evans has looked in a film since laying down the MCU shield, and it works well for the character, a cater-waiter working his butt off to basically stand still in his career. How can he compete with that international man of irresistibility, Pedro Pascal?
Introduced standing tall in a tuxedo, Pascal is every inch the unflappable Cary Grant this handsomely-shot romance needs him to be, a fount of warm, honeyed charisma.
True to form, he generates scintillating chemistry with Johnson, who, also true to her persona as one who calls folks on their bullshit with a smile, doesn’t stretch too far portraying Lucy’s hardened bonhomie.
Although, Lucy eventually lets her guard down, and the film finally reaches the raw, aching heart of one of its characters — just not one of the featured trio. A client of Lucy’s (Zoë Winters, in a beautifully dynamic turn) has a date go terribly wrong, leading Lucy to call bullshit on herself, a mode of self-reproach that Johnson does not convey as convincingly.
The episode adds dimension to the movie’s incisive portrayal of the dating landscape and purportedly aids Lucy along the path to solving her dilemma. But that conclusion seems foregone from the start, since despite constantly highlighting marriage’s history as a business transaction, the movie just as often bets on true love and can’t help showing its cards.
Materialists (★★★☆☆) is rated R, and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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