Materialists review - a misfiring romcom or an undercooked satire?

The Canadian-Korean director Celine Song burst onto the scene with her debut feature, Past Lives, two years ago, a bittersweet film about a woman torn between her first love, a Korean, and her current one, her American husband. Song is back with another woman at a crossroads, but in Materialists her heroine’s decision is much less painful to make, and far less affecting. 

This film is a curio: if Song’s name didn't appear in the opening credits, you would see it as a well cast mainstream romcom for grown-ups, with passages of seemingly sober analysis of the nature of love and marriage. It’s a romcom that doesn’t want to be an obvious crowd pleaser and, when it suits, is more cynical than breezy. It even attempts a bizarre pre-credits sequence, of a caveman gathering flowers and taking them back to his loved one, fashioning one into an engagement ring. 

Cut to present-day downtown Manhattan. Here, relationships are a form of maths (or math, as the US script has it), business deals made after processing your date's personal data. Making the calculations is Lucy (Dakota Johnson), the glamorous star agent at Adori, a matchmaking service for the well-heeled, who has nine weddings to her credit. Her clients come with a list of requirements, as if buying a car: age, height and Income usually top their lists, with quality of hair close behind. Lucy has to match up clients with similar scores, even though she knows they may be lying or deluding themselves. One man tells Lucy his previous two girlfriends were only in their early twenties and too immature, but when she suggests an ideal client who’s 31, he baulks and insists his dates be under 28, tops. Another client insists on a woman with a BMI no higher than 20.

Then Lucy's job becomes stage-managing this potential union. Somehow she manages to be serene and smiley, almost Zen-like in her refusal to be flummoxed by anything. Even when John (Chris Evans, pictured bottom), a struggling actor she once lived with, turns up as a waiter at the wedding reception of one of her clients and asks her to go for a drink, she is calm and collected and continues to work her charms on the groom’s brother, Harry (the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal). In her eyes Harry is a prospective client who ranks as a “unicorn” in Adori’s box-ticking system, perfect in every category: good-looking, tall, 40s, with a full head of hair, a $12 million apartment and a fat income from his private equity firm. She agrees to date him, to prove to him, she says, how ill-suited they are.

We can sense the set-up at once when Lucy admits to Harry she is single, somewhat cynical about marriage and wants only a “mind-achingly rich" man as her husband. This despite revealing elsewhere her personal belief that what people are really looking for in a partner is somebody who will stay by their side to the bitter end, despite their wrinkles and thinning hair and the need to change each other’s incontinence nappies. But which of these two visions of marriage, for richer or for poorer, does Lucy actually want? The script couches this choice as a mordant witticism: “Die alone, or get a rich husband?” ponders Lucy. “Same thing,” retorts her colleague. In public, Lucy is so robotically sincere, it’s hard to know what she really believes. She dreads a return to a life of bickering over money, so will she choose her gilded unicorn?

Song tries to build a similar kind of emotional crux to the one that sustained her first film, where the heroine’s decision about which man to be with seemingly could go either way almost to the final minutes of the film. But here, it’s an open and shut case long before the end. Or maybe it is to non-materialists: perhaps a high-net-worth individual might find Lucy's quandary genuinely challenging.

There is little that is complex in the three leads’ interactions. Even the sweet central romance is simplistic and insubstantial. Pascal is his usual solidly convincing self as a suave lonely rich man. And Evans works hard at giving John some edge, but Song has written him into a corner. All he can do is rail at his slobby flatmates and then suddenly freshen up for the grand finale. He’s a fine actor, excellent onstage, and it seems a pity he can’t be let off the leash more. 

Ditto Johnson, whose fixed smile begins to bore. When the mask slips and she finally says what she really thinks about her clients, the materialists of the title, it’s too little too late. And this honesty makes her ineligible as a tool of satire. She could have been an ambitious go-getter in the same mould as Nicole Kidman’s TV weathergirl in To Die For, but then Song would have had to decide Lucy was as status-obsessed as most of her clients. She didn’t, so the film settles for being a romcom at this point.That mode sits oddly, though, with the darker theme running through the script, that dating is a known high-risk venture, often making its participants sad, sometimes ending in violence. Romcoms don’t usually lead to restraining orders. 

The whole zips past almost too fast, jollied along by a soundtrack of thematically apt pop songs. Suddenly the plot has resolved itself, without delivering any of the flashpoints that are the stock-in-trade of the romcom, where people who don’t realise they truly love each other separate for usually stupid reasons until the writer reunites them. 

Where does Song stand in all this? How cynical is she personally about this milieu, these over-privileged people who cosmetically prepare themselves for the upscale meat market of their tribe? She clearly finds their pretensions hollow, but is she as cynical as Lucy seemingly is about marriage, that it’s a process of inevitable decline, regularly leading to divorce? Song starts by opening the door on an interestingly skewed world, only to close it again with its contents barely investigated. It’s entertaining enough, but somehow the perceptive director of Past Lives seems to have gone missing.

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