Review: MATERIALISTS

 by Rob DiCristino

“You can do the math, can’t you?”

One of the only genuinely incisive moments in Celine Song’s (Past Lives) new romantic comedy, Materialists — and Materialists does intend to be a romantic comedy, as much as Song may imagine herself above all that — finds matchmaking marvel Lucy (Dakota Johnson) kvetching with a colleague about a particularly troublesome client. She’s a nice girl, this client, but she’s set her standards too high for a thirty-something New Yorker with average looks and below-average income. She deserves a good match, Lucy insists, but without any standout features to distinguish herself in the market — money, education, surgically-enhanced height — she’s doomed to repeat the same average dates with the same average guys. Dating is a marketplace, the matchmakers agree, a series of calculated risks taken by economic actors trying to solve the equation of their lives. Lucy and the others at Adore Matchmaking are paid to evaluate these factors and pair clients with suitors who check enough of their boxes to produce the desired result: Marriage.

This may sound like a cold approach to Happily Ever After, but Lucy and her friend have a point: Marriages are economic arrangements, legal agreements between two parties looking to improve their social standing and silence whatever childhood insecurities are still haunting them. Take one client, who admits that she’s mostly marrying her fiancé because it will make her sister jealous. This fiancé is what Lucy calls a “unicorn,” a rich, handsome, well-educated man with no addictions or obsessions that might derail a stable domestic environment. The boxes are checked. The math works out. Sure, these people may not be in love, but love isn’t in Lucy’s wheelhouse, anyway. It’s incalculable. An outlier. Love is that thing Lucy felt for John (Chris Evans), an ex-boyfriend from her acting days. John seemed like the sort of caring and attentive guy that many of Lucy’s clients would kill for, but there’s just one problem: He’s broke. Like, “thirty-five-year-old with roommates” broke. Love may be grand, and all that, but there’s just no place for it on a balance sheet.

Harry (Pedro Pascal), on the other hand, is another unicorn, a legacy finance bro with perfect eyes and impeccable taste. He knows which clothes to wear and which restaurants to visit and which haircut most flatters his head shape. He’s charming and well-read, and he’s confident enough to toss Lucy the keys to his palatial Tribeca apartment after just one night together. The math checks out, in other words, and even after reconnecting with John at a client’s wedding — he’s working for a catering company while his new play gets off the ground — Lucy knows that a life with Harry will bolster the mathematical approach to coupling that has defined her career. And unlike those deluded clients of hers — the middle-aged suit who insists on dating women under thirty, or the cat-hating lesbian who demands her matches be conservative Republicans — Lucy understands her role in the marketplace. She knows her worth and her limits, and Harry is within both ranges. But if that’s true, why does her reunion with John make her question everything?

If Past Lives tells the story of childhood sweethearts and missed connections with a gauzy ethereality that barely rises above the sound of a whisper, then Celine Song’s sophomore effort is a primal shriek of acerbic rage, an airing of grievances tailor-made for an audience raised in a romance industrial complex that reinforces an impossible standard for love and relationships. Lucy seems to know she’s in a rom-com, at times, ducking and weaving around classic tropes with the kind of “you can’t fool me” cynicism that helped Sidney Prescott survive all those Scream movies. Her icy detachment — compounded by a Dakota Johnson performance that we might politely characterize as “clinical and understated” or less politely characterize as “dead-eyed and vacant” — is a callus over her longings, a front she presents to protect her from vulnerability. It’s only after a client date turns tragic that Lucy considers the possibility that we’re not just numbers on a spreadsheet and that the intangibles she so confidently dismissed have a rightful place in the equation.

But whereas these revelations would typically bring a story’s thesis into focus, they butt up against Song’s resistance to genre convention and force Materialists into a corner it can’t quite escape. There’s a misguided arrogance to Song’s approach, an unwillingness to admit that — despite A24’s protestations — she’s making a classical romantic comedy, after all. The result is a tonally-confused, catastrophically unfunny effort whose closest recent analogue might be, believe it or not, Deadpool & Wolverine: Both are wanna-be satires that bemoan the drudgery of clichè without offering more satisfying approaches to their conflicts and eventually settle into exactly the comfortable denouements we’d expect. Despite the high thread-count production, most of Song’s insights are as shallow as Chris Evans’ Nice Guy John and as transient as Pedro Pascal’s twelve minutes on screen (though he does get the film’s best joke). Materialists is as presumptuous as Lucy’s dim-witted clients, ironically enough, a film that hopelessly overestimates its value in the marketplace.

Materialists hits U.S. theaters on Friday, June 13th.