In the Celine Song-written and directed Materialists, Dakota Johnson's Lucy takes great care getting ready for work. In the film's opening shots, we watch her apply reddish-brown lip liner to already-lined lips, carefully adding layer upon layer, before finally dabbing a terracotta lipstick on with her fingers. Her hair is carefully gathered in a low ponytail, the ends softly curled, and her bangs hold perfect place. What we see of her apartment shows that it is clean and white.
On her way to work, she turns the tables on a man who tries to hit on her by giving him her card — she is a matchmaker and if he would like help in finding people to date, he should get in touch. In a swift turn, we learn that Lucy is no-nonsense, pragmatic and knowing. She understands that the modern world of dating obsesses over optics and appearances more than a desire for true love, whatever that be, and she works to help her clients achieve their superficial dreams. This understanding is what makes Lucy a successful matchmaker, and it's one that itself stems from an understanding of herself as no different to the average dater: she, and everyone around her, is a materialist. It — Lucy, the New York of this film, the film itself — is as simple, lonely, unchallenging and boring as that.
Lucy comes from a working-class, broken family. As a child she was cornered by her parents' incessant fighting, growing to resent them and they her. Now in her mid-30s, she craves security and safety, which means being with a partner who is more than financially stable — Lucy wants a rich man. In her 20s, when she thought she wanted to be an actor, she dated John (Chris Evans), an aspiring no-nonsense theatre actor committed to the starving artist bit. John drives a clunky car through New York, pays around $800 in rent for a gross apartment he shares with two other roommates, and works in between high-brow acting gigs as a catering waiter.
Lucy dumps John because she doesn't want to spend her anniversaries eating from, in her words, a halal food truck, because only poor people eat from halal food trucks. When their paths cross again, John remains living the same life, while Lucy begins dating Harry (Pedro Pascal), a man from an uber-wealthy family who works at a private equity firm. Harry checks all of Lucy's boxes, he has everything she wants in a partner: good looks, six feet-plus, and money. But does she love him?
Materialists presents a familiar tale of striving for a good life, asking whether it is more worthwhile to marry rich but loveless, or to marry poor but happy. The answer, for Song, at least on the face of it, is the "correct" one, that is, a person should marry for love. But in taking a closer look, it becomes clear that the film's values and judgement lie in favour of wealth. Take an even closer look and it becomes clear that the film remains in thrall to the systems it ironizes.
Materialists is a very capitalistic movie, and as such, it presents happiness and love as experiences that take place only in isolation from a community. The good life here values individualism, it's the American Dream, which the film sees as something viable as opposed to a myth. Sure, it satirizes how we talk about dating by presenting us with walls of dialogue studded with the cutthroat financial terms of "risk," "loss," "value," "strategy," "deal," and "contract," which we might use to describe the ephemeral and immaterial objects of the stock market, but it doesn't seem to be able to grasp a new, human language either.
Time and again, Lucy equates finding the right partner with something as simple as math, because Song wants to make abundantly clear that modern romantic relationships are like business deals made between two people, with each one committing to the other based on what they can offer them, based on how well they check their boxes.
People hire Lucy to, effectively, go shopping for them, to find them the perfect product; a person, especially a woman, is seen to be "valuable" only if she fits someone's bill, if she serves someone's needs. Lucy's clients are taken on for their value on the dating market, and in turn for their value to her professional success.
Song aims to criticize how we have come to see each other as expendable commodities, to show that we have misplaced human value, finding it in physical beauty, age and income instead; the optics of it all. A valid and trenchant observation to be sure. But at the same time, the film doesn't articulate a healthy alternative or express what meaningful love and partnership divorced from the commodifying language of capitalism look like. Even by the film's end, when we get an image of ostensibly true love, Lucy and John continue using the word "value" in talking about why they like each other.
There's nothing inherently wrong with making an informed decision, but it feels strange in this film for the way it is presented as both bad — in the case of Lucy's clients who come with prepared lists about what they want in a partner — and good, in Lucy and John's case, who come together because they have considered the pros and cons of their union and have decided to "invest" in the relationship.
While Song critiques treating partnerships like business deals, she also leaves the behaviour unchallenged throughout the film. The script still uses Lucy's language — the language of capitalism — to make its case for love, meaning that her understanding of the world persists unchanged and she herself remains ideologically comfortable.
For Song, love isn't something one can fall into at any moment, unawares, rather, it's something to make a conscious and calculated decision about. In Materialists, love doesn't feel like it's human or emotional, intuitive or messy, an experience that enriches lives other than our own, or something one can feel within a community. Instead, it's clean, precise and intentional, between two people only.
There isn't much desire or passion in this film at all — it's very controlled, arid and rarefied. Part of this could be a stylistic choice. At one point, John performs in an experimental and minimalist, fourth-wall breaking play in the style of the Living Theatre, wherein he delivers a deadpan monologue about being on a date, while Lucy and Harry watch in slight confusion — it's too high-brow and too affected, they seem to be suppressing smiles.
Meanwhile, the monotony of Lucy and Harry's conversations while they go on innumerable dates resembles the monologue that John delivers; all the two talk about is Lucy's job, and why and how they tick each other's boxes. They don't discuss their passions, their likes or dislikes, nothing seems to get heated — not even the sex. This could work as a commentary on how obsessed we have become with dating if it weren't for the fact that Lucy truly doesn't have a personality outside of her work. Even with John, who she's known for years, all she talks about is dating.
Their performances carry the dialogue's heavy monotony. Johnson is so stiff it's jarring. At one point, when Lucy and Harry make out and he picks her up, her legs remain straight as a pin, as though a plastic doll. Bodies seem unable to mesh into each other in this film, they remain cold and isolated, above being melted by passion. Evans, too, is awkward, too big for this role, obviously trying to shrink himself into the form of a poor, working man who hates how poor he is. His hair is too clean, his face too perfect, his beard too manicured.
Zoë Winters delivers the film's only memorable performance — as Sophie, a 39-year-old client of Lucy's, in turns optimistic and heartbroken. Winters is so good and so human here, it's endlessly moving when she weeps and yells at Lucy for leading her astray and into a situation that harms her. We weep alongside her. It's so strange to see Johnson's Lucy dry-eyed and unmoving in the face of such emotion. Sophie's tears and reality take to task Lucy's stiffness, making her existence redundant and irrelevant. When pain overcomes Sophie as she spews her accusations against Lucy, she chokes down a sob and it's as if she regrets her show of emotion, wasted as it is on Johnson's character.
Everything in this film is coolly restrained, which seems to stem from its visceral disdain for poverty. The New York City the characters walk through is unpeopled and quiet and safe, not smoggy and choked with traffic and damp. When danger lurks and strikes, it targets someone else, its dire effect is felt only in an ambient and self-centered guilt for Lucy. The film contains a lot of money talk, but Song depicts any real financial worry in a caricatured and seismic way by Evans's character, who is apparently angry and disgusted by his lot from the moment he wakes.
Song delivers a message that it's possible to not be poor and eat from the halal food truck, and the film ends by saying this is simple, you just have to be willing to work. In the way that the American Dream puts the onus of accumulating wealth on individuals and blames them when they inevitably fail within a system rigged against them, this film blames individuals and their personal hang-ups for failures in dating, not the alienating society we've built.
The point of the movie is that you can find love with people who don't check all your boxes, but this still has to be a negotiation where you're willing to make compromises. Being single and miserable is self-inflicted, just lower your standards and the same obstacle course of dating will be easier.
The film presents us with a world it endlessly criticizes, yet finds impossible to change — its problems are irrefutable and therefore have a right to continue unabated. There is nothing wrong with the overarching capitalistic system that fosters hyper-individuality and the current cruel and transactional mode of dating, the film says.
Song bookends the film with lonely and depressing vignettes. In the beginning, the director depicts two cavepeople exchanging engagement rings made of flowers, they're alone as they commit their love to each other. In the end, the same couple sit within a cave caressing the woman's pregnant belly.
These two vignettes of people existing extremely outside of modern society seem like an appeal to nature, a depiction of simpler, and therefore better times, when love was easy; but ironically, the film shows even this extreme past in modern, capitalistic terms. The prehistoric couple has achieved the American Dream of a nuclear family living in a single-family home, a unit apart from any collectivist society or community, they don't have anybody else around them in the way that Lucy doesn't have any friends. That she doesn't have any friends doesn't feel like one of the film's criticisms because community is not something that exists in its scope.
Happiness in this film is very much dependent on material comfort, beauty and Western ideals. This film tries to critique a capitalistic understanding of love, but it doesn't know of any other kind of love; all its criticisms feel as though capitalism itself is nagging us, telling us to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and fix our lives.
Materialists certainly presents an interesting and much-needed critique of the modern state of romantic relationships, but it doesn't understand what fulfilling love is, it doesn't make an argument for what we should strive for outside of material goods and needs capitalism has conditioned us to have.
More and more people today are ditching the apps and choosing to devote their time and energy to creating meaningful and lasting friendships, to caring for and fostering local and global communities, railing against current society's idea that we remain isolated from one another. But this movement toward others doesn't feel viable in a film as lonely as Materialists.
There's nothing at stake in this film, it feels like a shill for capitalism, materialistic through and through — cold, dispassionate, and really sad.