Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Celine Song
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Marin Ireland, Zoë Winters
Hollywood doesn't make many romantic comedies today for the same reason it didn't make many horror movies during World War II. Romance is something a lot of people would now rather not think about. It's an unattainable fantasy in a western world where so many young people can't even afford to rent a shared bedsit, let alone a home to raise a family in. How can you lead a romantic life when you're a 30-year-old who still has to sneak a date up the stairs and past your sleeping parents? It wasn't always like this. For the second half of the twentieth century western governments actually cared about meeting people's basic needs, leaving them free to pursue romance. Now they're more concerned with housing data centres than families.
Despite how its misjudged marketing campaign might portray it, writer/director Celine Song's Materialists isn't a romantic comedy. It's a brutally honest exploration of the role of romance in the 21st century. It's an almost anthropological study of our shallow expectations of a romantic partner, but it doesn't shame us for such desires. To be reductive, men seek youth and physical fitness in a partner and women seek wealth and height. Is this superficial? Sure, but it's simply a result of evolution. The fittest, tallest and wealthiest are the ones who survive.
The film is set in one of the most superficial, Darwinian places on Earth: New York City. There we find Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker for the city's high society. Lucy's job is to match her male and female clients, who trust her to ensure no potential partners lie about their weight, age, height or wealth. In her introduction Lucy fields a call from a male client who complains that his date was too old and fat. She then meets a female client who complains that her date wasn't tall or wealthy enough.
This superficiality has rubbed off on Lucy, who has essentially removed herself from the dating pool. Having once been in a relationship with a broke actor, John (Chris Evans), Lucy has declared that she will now only settle for an obscenely wealthy man. At the wedding of two of her more successful clients, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a tall, dark and handsome millionaire who immediately hits on her. Lucy sees Harry as the perfect client, but he persuades her to begin dating him herself. At the same wedding Lucy also re-encounters John, now working as a caterer as he prepares for a role in an off-Broadway play. John is still broke, still living in the same crummy shared apartment, and still in love with Lucy.
Like many rom-coms, Materialists boils down to its heroine facing a crossroads. Does she spend the rest of her life with the handsome rich guy she doesn't really love or the handsome broke guy for whom she has genuine affection? The difference here is that the movie makes a convincing argument for both scenarios, or better still, for the argument that neither of these men are a match for Lucy. It doesn't villainise Lucy for wanting a life where she doesn't have to constantly worry about money. It doesn't portray her as a golddigger for admitting she enjoys being treated to dinner at expensive restaurants. Crucially, Harry is a nice guy, arguably nicer than John, whose self-pity is a bit of a red flag. In Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Love is placed third, below the need for food, safety and shelter. Lucy is simply self-aware enough to recognise that she needs a man who can help fulfil those needs before love enters the equation.
Song takes a cold, detached approach to portraying this world, and it's often shot more like a thriller than a romance. New York high society here looks just as it did in Mary Harron's American Psycho, a soulless world of surfaces kept glistening by out of sight Latin hands. Lucy and Harry's blunt conversations regarding what they can offer one another are filmed as though Clarice Starling or Will Graham are interrogating Hannibal Lector. A scene involving the revelation of some extreme physical surgery to enhance a character's "value in the marketplace" is positively Cronenbergian. Things take an especially dark turn when one of Lucy's female clients is the subject of an assault by the man Lucy matched her with, prompting a professional and existential crisis in Lucy.
It's refreshing to see an American movie take such an honest approach to depicting the cynicism of modern romance, but in its final act Materialists reverts to type as it embraces the clichés of the rom-com. It does so, however, in a way that plays like a middle finger to the constraints of society, two characters trying to beat the odds in a game where the house almost always wins. While Johnson and Evans are both excellent here, the casting of two very attractive people who have both played superheroes makes the film's ultimate "love is all you need" message seem a little patronising, as does the prologue's suggestion that cave people experienced genuine romance in the days before civilisation. The caveman wanted a fit mate, and the cavewoman wanted a mate who could provide her with food and shelter. Little has changed in the millennia since; our caves just got less affordable.
Materialists is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 13th.
