There's a great scene in Celine Song's romantic drama Materialists, the follow-up to her excellent debut Past Lives, and it involves no romance whatsoever. It does involve the discussion of romantic feelings, or their notable absence: Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker to New York City's most desperate and wealthy marriage-seekers, is attending the extravagant wedding of Charlotte, a client for whom she successfully found a partner. Or so she thought: Lucy's summoned behind-the-scenes to Charlotte's room and finds her strewn across the bed in her wedding dress, distraught; the bride feels ashamed that she, an accomplished and independent woman, has given in to the traditional marriage industrial complex.
Lucy calmly assures Charlotte that she doesn't have to do anything she doesn't want to do, and then asks what it is that drew her to her husband-to-be in the first place, and Charlotte confesses: This outrageously wealthy and successful guy makes her sister – who's married to a less wealthy and less successful guy – jealous. Like a therapist, Lucy immediately interprets what Charlotte is really saying: "He makes you feel valuable."
Materialists, as the title implies, is about trying to find love in a material world, a tale as old as time. It's the kind of story where hardened cynics like Lucy can only perceive of romantic relationships in capitalistic lingo – single people are evaluated by how "competitive" they are in "the market;" the most superficially desirable individuals (wealthy, "fit," and of a certain age), are "unicorns;" and marriage compatibility is treated like an equation where "the math has to add up." That scene at Charlotte's wedding gets at a contemporary anxiety playing out constantly in op-eds, relationship podcasts, dating shows, and everyday life, where some women feel as if they must reconcile their progressive values with the demands of a capitalist society and the urge to lean into heteronormativity in their romantic pursuits. The pressure to partner up for financial security remains to a degree just as external as it was in the age of Jane Austen, yet Song seems to be saying that deep down some women fear that the call is coming from inside the house — that they really are that basic and heteronormative.
Song's presentation of Lucy's own love life, the central romance of Materialists, mimics these competing desires familiarly and less successfully. Like countless fictional white women before her, Lucy finds herself torn between two suitors who are leagues apart economically. Behind door number one is her prince, Harry (Pedro Pascal), an older and wealthy private equity guy eager to sweep her off her feet and into his $12 million penthouse. At door number two is her pauper and ex, John (Chris Evans), who happens to re-enter her life on the same night she meets Harry. John's a cater waiter living with grimy roommates while pursuing acting. Some time ago, Lucy broke up with him because she couldn't see herself with somebody who probably has to check their bank account every other day to make sure it's not overdrawn.
With her semi-autobiographical Past Lives, Song upended the conventional dramatic structure of the love triangle to tell a complex story about migration, ambition, and grief for what-could-have-been via a cosmopolitan playwright, her American husband, and the childhood crush she left behind in Korea years ago. In contrast, Materialists isn't breaking the mold, and ends exactly how anyone might expect it to. This predictability isn't a fatal flaw; a well-trod journey can still soar on the strength of witty banter and sparks between its leads.
But Song doesn't even have two sticks to rub together to imagine a spark between Johnson and her onscreen suitors. A crucial issue is the script – like her client Charlotte, Lucy is also deeply conflicted about her desire to live a luxe life without passion or true love, so much so that her level of attraction to either of these men is damn near inscrutable. With Harry, she ogles his limitless wealth. Yet as they dine out at exclusive world-class restaurants, she questions his interest in her and tries to convince him he can do better, as in: younger, prettier, and with wider hips for birthing babies. (OK, that last one I made up, though if my memory serves she does note that, as a 30-something, her window for having children is rapidly closing.) And with John, she offers up inverse reasoning to push him away: "I'm obsessed with money, I'm cold … I'm awful," she argues, as the rest of us looking on nod furiously in agreement. "I'm weighing being with you against these s*** tradeoffs … How could you still love me?"
She's at least refreshingly self-aware, but the screenplay requires that Lucy eventually both soften her edges and choose to pair up with someone by movie's end. To come to this conclusion, the filmmaker introduces an ill-conceived B-plot that suggests Lucy has found redemption – and romantic clarity – via the traumatic misfortune of a tertiary character.
To make any of this work – and to suspend your disbelief that Lucy makes $80K a year before taxes while living in a nice New York City apartment without roommates or help from a benefactor, familial or otherwise – Song would need a versatile performer who can sell Lucy's messiness as well as her incredible internal leaps and bounds. Johnson's icy aloofness, oft on display in highly memed interviews, plays fine when Lucy is in work mode, dealing with clients with laughably unrealistic (and often sexist) dating expectations. (This is one of the other aspects of dating Song gets absolutely right, and she has a lot of fun with a couple of montages on this front.) But the iciness smooths into flatness when Lucy's meant to be flirting or baring her soul. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo's characters in Past Lives exchange far more heat over Skype calls thousands of miles apart than Johnson ever does with Pascal or Evans.
One other scene stands out to suggest a more unusual and fascinating curio that could've been. Harry reveals something utterly strange about himself – the lengths he's gone to find love, or something like it – and in doing so gives credence to the notion that we all live with the basic need to be found attractive by others, no matter the size of our bank account. It's easy enough to understand Song's impulse to write something like Materialists – to question what we value and how we perceive our own value, and to do so through characters who think and speak so clinically of partnering as if it were an equation to be solved. Yet even if the intent – as it seems to be – is to ultimately critique such meticulous calculations, the conclusion's inevitability ends up cynical and regressively binary anyhow. It's the kind of film that speaks to the moment while failing to connect its observations to something resembling dramatic tension.
Materialists stands to serve as a meaningful time capsule years from now, preserving the memory of dating woes held by a very specific segment of the millennial-and-younger population, like Claudia Weill's Girlfriends or Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey have for previous generations. Its value as a romance worth swooning over, however, seems dubious.
Copyright 2025 NPR
