'Materialists' Romances a Broader Critique But Betrays Its Protagonist in the Process

Warning: spoilers for 'Materialists' ahead.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

This sentence, which famously opened Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, could just as easily describe Pedro Pascal’s Harry, one point in the love-triangle that Celine Song’s Materialists revolves around. Harry is a handsome and rich bachelor who pursues Dakota Johnson’s Lucy. Lucy, a matchmaker for those in high-society, initially pushes away his advances in an attempt to wrangle him in as one of her clients. However, his persistence ultimately wins out, and the pair begin dating. Their pairing symbolizes Lucy’s connection to modern dating and romance – in her career, dating is a numbers game, so why can’t it be a numbers game in her personal life as well? 

Throughout Materialists, the pull between Lucy’s suitors Harry and John (Chris Evans) shows where she’s sat in her career. Her job is to check the boxes for her clients and find them a life partner through the simple math of desired height, weight, income, etc. We meet Lucy at a moment of triumph in her career: she has just facilitated her ninth wedding between clients, and we see her talking the bride out of cold feet to walk down the aisle via the simple recognition that her soon-to-be husband makes her feel valuable. 

In this conversation with her client, Lucy distills the match down to the most basic math, resulting in a cold and unfeeling reading of something that is supposed to be romantic. This strategic outlook on dating and matchmaking is Lucy’s modus operandi; she distills her clients down to their statistics and then pairs them up based on who checks each other’s boxes. This conversation is where Materialists reveals its hand. While to an onlooker, it seems as though Lucy is setting up love matches, the audience quickly learns that she doesn’t really believe that’s what she’s doing. In an early conversation with Harry, she even refutes his statement that being a  matchmaker means she knows a lot about love. In revealing that Lucy doesn’t believe in the merit of her profession so early, the rest of the film unravels. 

In the almost hour-and-a-half that follows this revelation, the film’s central love triangle plays out. Lucy allows herself to get caught up in Harry, thus giving up on a love match and choosing to buy into the math of dating that she sells to clients. However, as Harry continues to court her, she finds herself drawn to her ex-boyfriend John. John is an aspiring actor who does local productions and works catering jobs to make ends meet. From the first time we meet him, it is clear that he still has feelings for Lucy, but as we learn early on, their breakup was because of the strain of John’s financial situation. Even though John knows that he and Lucy were not a match in the mathematical sense, he understands that dating Harry is an overcorrection on Lucy’s part, and remains skeptical of her decision to give up on love in the name of financial security.

As the love triangle unfolds, Lucy starts to reconsider her feelings towards her job. The love triangle and job plot lines mirror each other, with the breaking point in both being the sexual assault of Lucy’s favorite client, Sophie, by a man she sets her up with. When she learns of the assault, Lucy is horrified – she’s never considered this possibility and does not appreciate the nonchalant manner in which her boss handles the situation. In this moment, the final shred of faith in her work disappears and, following a confrontation with Sophie, she is no longer willing to sell the idea that relationships and love can be an equation. 

Shortly after this revelation, Lucy breaks things off with Harry, who was planning to propose to her. She tells him simply that, even though he is great and the math adds up for what she desires, they don’t love each other. “Love has to be on the table,” she tells him. In the final quarter of the film, Lucy reunites with John and quits her job, fully abandoning the idea that relationships can and should be reduced to an equation.

Ultimately, Materialists chooses hope. For a movie that wrestles with the relationship between material assets and love, it opts to send the message that love is all you need. John, in his proposal to Lucy, even quips “How would you like to make a very bad financial decision?” As a lover of romance movies, Materialists was one of my most anticipated releases of the year, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t deeply disappointed by the film. 

The candid nature of Song's screenplay and Dakota Johnson’s dry delivery can be endearing at times, especially as the film pokes fun at Lucy’s clientele. Ultimately, however, bluntness proves to be the film’s downfall. As we learn very quickly, Lucy does not think her clients are good people. Or, at least, she does not think they are realistic and smart people. Sophie, the client Lucy cares for the most, has been continually denied second dates because her age and appearance do not fit people’s ideal standards for their partner.

Despite this, she refuses to budge on her own standards, stating that she is just “trying to settle.” This obsession with the equation and checking everyone's boxes is something Lucy tries to push back against with her clients, but she ultimately knows that she must appease them and try to find them a match based on their physical and material desires. All conversations between Lucy and her clients have an element of the outrageous and unreasonable, and while Lucy tries to maintain neutrality, you get the sense that she is in on the joke. 

The idea that this Lucy, the one who is keenly aware of how ridiculous it sounds when her clients obsess over the math of dating, is the same person who obsesses over the math of dating in her own life is a conflicting characterization. In the film’s A-plot, we learn that Lucy’s history with John is what made her believe that material assets matter in dating, which is why she has chosen to pursue a connection that is solely about material assets with Harry.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Lucy pokes fun at her clients and their tunnel vision when it comes to material assets. These plotlines, which are meant to mirror each other, feel disjointed because the Lucy from the B-plot would know it is a waste of her time to pursue a connection like Harry. I didn’t understand how it was supposed to be a revelation when Lucy finally comes to her senses and ends things with Harry, and it’s annoying that it takes two thirds of the runtime to come to the basic conclusion that connections based solely on material assets are not sustainable – not to mention the film’s use of sexual assault as a catalyst for this realization.

Materialists was met with mixed reviews, but a general consensus of these reviews is that despite the film marketing itself as a rom-com, it is in fact not a rom-com. It is rarely funny, more of a melancholic commentary on modern dating, with some sweet and humorous moments sprinkled in. However, even as a purported commentary on modern dating, it has a total lack of nuance and subtlety.

Song’s screenplay pokes fun at the material guidelines for dating that have become too common in the modern world, satirizing the standards that Lucy’s clients set as hard boundaries. Although a worthwhile conversation in the age of dating apps and stats-based dating, setting Materialists in the milieu of New York City’s ultra-wealthy derails it from being about modern dating as a whole and makes it more of a satire of the wealthy. 

Despite distinctly modern story elements, like a conversation about cosmetic surgery increasing one’s “market value,” the film’s commentary about the material and romance isn’t new at all. Bringing it back to Jane Austen, it's worth noting that several of her works grapple with this theme. Pride and Prejudice might be regarded as one of the most romantic stories of all time, but it also heavily satirizes the pursuit of material value over romantic connection. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy fall in love despite not checking each others’ boxes, and Austen manages to deliver a strong romance that has interesting things to say about societal standards in courtship. Materialists, on the other hand, marketed itself as a romance and instead delivered a half-baked romance plot against the backdrop of stale social commentary. 

-Hiley