“Materialists” opens in the Paleolithic period of the Stone Age. A caveman brings tools and flowers to the woman he loves, hoping they’ll be enough to earn her affection. We may think love gets purer the further back in time you go, but there has always been a business angle. Dowries, negotiations and aligning kingdoms were the old ways of forming a union.
Now there’s an algorithm for that, loaded with statistics like height, income and political views. And for those who are more serious (or desperate) and have the funds, there are services like Adore, which assign a personal matchmaker to search for you.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is one of those matchmakers – and a damn good one, to be specific. She’s responsible for nine marriages, salvaging the most recent by spinning the bride’s cold-feet confession – that part of the reason she’s marrying the groom is to make her sister jealous – into a lesson about finding value and feeling valued.
The key to her success is to treat dating as a business venture, using the same calculating mindset you’d find on Wall Street. “Market forces,” “competitive advantage” and “strategic skills” are her phrases of choice. The results speak for themselves, and there’s no denying that this is the path the dating landscape is rapidly progressing along.
It’s both natural and a bit odd that after writer-director Celine Song tenderly explored the concept of destiny and love in “Past Lives,” her follow-up takes a cold, hard look at the facts. There isn’t going to be a Prince Charming waiting in the wings, or a Cinderella who perfectly fits the glass slipper. Dating is a trial-and-error endeavor, with adaptability and compromise being the most important qualities.
Song makes sure there are a lot of laughs to be had with all this nonsense. Lucy’s customers are demanding, neurotic, and impatient. A potential match must be this tall, be in this age range, like these certain songs/movies, and make at least this amount of money. Living in the Midwest certainly didn’t prepare me for the astronomical figures people expect to receive on the East Coast. But all of this is funny because they’re saying the quiet parts out loud, and deep down, we all know we do it too.
The eternal bachelorette who has a knack for helping others find love is a trope as old as the romantic dramedy itself. Song may know how to reexamine it in the ways I just described, but she also knows how to harness its extremely potent traditional qualities. She also knows how to best steer the performers on all sides of this love triangle.
Yes, Lucy gets more than she bargains for when she simultaneously finds affection in two separate places. Johnson is perpetually on a pendulum swinging back and forth. And after the swing (and miss) that was “Madame Web,” she was due for a major slide to the lighter side.
We meet Pedro Pascal’s Harry as he charms his way through his brother’s wedding reception. He’s also obscenely rich, tall and handsome. He’s what Lucy refers to as a “unicorn” in her line of work – the man of every woman’s dreams.
John (Chris Evans) has some of those qualities, but definitely not the financial ones. He’s your usual struggling actor with a part-time catering job who lives in a crappy apartment. But he’s real, and there’s a reason Lucy and he were together for five years before they broke up. We’ve seen characters with these archetypes before, but here they’re steeped in enough authenticity so you can’t just immediately pick a side.
“Materialists” can also be too honest for its own good. There’s a darker element that gets introduced later in the story that drives part of Lucy’s decision-making about her personal life. Song handles it to the best of her ability, but its inclusion is habitually distracting from the other excellent qualities. Honesty is still the best policy, and Song continues to show that she’s a master of telling us how it is in the ways we want to hear it.
A24 will release “Materialists” in theaters nationwide on June 13.
Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and everything in between. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.
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