Materialists Tries To Update the Rom-Com for the Tinder Generation
Celine Song, writer-director of the thoughtful, poignant, highly praised, Best Picture–nominated drama Past Lives (2023), has come out with her second film, a romantic comedy called Materialists. Song’s trying to be thoughtful about that too — the way the silly, swoony genre as a whole works, as well as the way the real-life perils of contemporary romance play out. But how to get the swoony and the cruelly crass together in one film?
And Song has done her research when it comes to the cold calculations involved in matchmaking companies such as the one at the center of Materialists. It seems Song worked as a matchmaker in the 2010s and “learned more about people in those six months than at any other time in my life.”
Out of that bruising experience, she created the narrative following the love life of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a leading rep at the New York City–based matchmaking company Adore. Lucy is a smooth cynic when it comes to “doing the math” — rating prospective “matches” in hard-edged calculations of age, height, weight, fitness, profession, educational level, conventional notions of physical attractiveness, and above all, income.
The greedy, calculating demands of Lucy’s clients are driven by their elaborate fantasies of what they think they “deserve,” which are presumably influenced by the movies. Everyone’s seeking dream dates and regards themselves as entitled to perfect love, no matter how manifestly imperfect they are themselves.
But then Lucy herself meets a “unicorn,” Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a man who’s tall, handsome, and rich, a perfect ten in terms of the “math.” He inspires Lucy to reenter the dating game herself, regarding Harry with the frank objective of marrying him for his money. She finds Harry’s opulent Manhattan apartment so desirable it first distracts from — and then ignites — her first sexual encounter with him.
Though as a professional, she feels compelled to warn Harry, in a businesslike, honest-broker way, that he could do better. She’s in her thirties, and younger women in their twenties are valued much higher. Plus she makes a mere $80,000 per year, chicken feed in NYC, which means she’s carrying a lot of debt. But Harry assures her she has “intangible” value that makes up for these deficits. She’s reached the status of a “luxury good.” Such a romantic!
But John still loves her as helplessly as ever, and she’s called him in the past whenever she really needed a confidante. She phones him immediately when something terrible happens at work. One of the clients she’s working hardest for is Sophie (Zoe Winters), a mature professional who is also “a nice girl” being harshly rejected by her dates. “She’s fat and forty,” says one appalling git after a date with Sophie. “I’d never swipe right on a woman like that.”
Then — SPOILER, I suppose — Sophie is assaulted by a “match” Lucy made for her. It’s a grimly common risk of dating through matchmaking companies — or any other way.
The way Materialists moves abruptly into drama later in the story is a common trait of the romantic comedy genre, which differs from wildly irreverent screwball comedy by tending to seek, ultimately, a solemn validation of conventional notions of heterosexual love. However, romantic comedies don’t ever plunge into as dark an abyss as Materialists does.
It should be noted that Materialists in general isn’t delivering a lot of laughs. It’s not exactly chuckle-worthy, for example, when we see the montages of people seeking matches who list their ever-more unrealistic and appalling criteria for dates. As Lucy finally acknowledges, it’s impossible to ethically cooperate with such despicable demands as “no black people, no fatties.”
Yet grating against such realistic horrors in Materialists are the distracting fantasy elements required for romantic comedies. For example, the standard torn-between-two-lovers plot pivots on Dakota Johnson, who looks like a fashion model. She’s so tall and svelte and perfectly planed, she might’ve convincingly played a “fembot” in the old Austin Powers movies. The daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, Dakota Johnson is a glossy product of Hollywood entertainment-industry breeding. To see her deciding between the overwhelmingly attractive and sympathetic Pedro Pascal and the absurdly handsome former Captain America Chris Evans is to be presented with one of those glamorous Hollywood problems one can only dream of having.
In other ways, Materialists really tests the limits of how much grim 2020s reality a movie can reflect while still functioning in the fantasy realm of romantic comedy. Though if you’re going to take on current Western world realities, why not address the vaster spread of love’s possibilities? Also note that the title might mislead you into thinking this movie is going to do something savvier about bleak material conditions — like how is Lucy living so nicely and dressing so fabulously in NYC on $80,000 a year? Even indebtedness can’t quite account for it. But Materialists (once again, despite the promising title) treads very lightly on this subject.
The film really functions more as an erratic meta-commentary on the rom-com genre, which is a warning to those who might be thinking they’re going to see some old-fashioned lark such as the ones that used to pair a Sandra Bullock with a Hugh Grant. Though to hear Celine Song tell it, she’s really channeling some of her romantic comedy faves, such as Nora Ephron’s Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan vehicles Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Personally, I hate Nora Ephron movies, which did so much to help ruin the legacy of the classic romantic comedy genre. What she did to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant The Shop Around the Corner (1940), for example, in order to create the idiotic You’ve Got Mail should be considered a criminal offense.
There’s just something wrongheaded and wrong-hearted about the whole Materialists project. I especially hated the prelude featuring a prehistoric couple tenderly courting in front of their cave dwellings. It’s irrational perhaps, but I felt somehow outraged on behalf of the cave dwellers being held up for sappy idealizing, these noble savages enacting “natural” love for us jaded modern types.
This isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that someone tries to work the Jane Austen magic and finds it’s a lot tougher than they figured.
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Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
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