'Materialists' review: Love and other banalities

The opening of Materialists yearns to be the deer in the snow in Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (2017). But this is an American film, so poetic animal metaphors are out. The question remains: why does Celine Song’s film—which insists throughout that marriage is a business deal—begin with an Edenic scene of a man and woman in love? We have to wait till the last five minutes to learn they’re a dream Lucy had of the first people who decided to marry. It’s funny enough with Johnson’s uninflected voiceover, even better that the film’s idea of cave people is ‘average Middle Eastern farmer’. 

After they meet at a client’s wedding, Lucy is steadily pursued by the groom’s brother, financier Harry (Pedro Pascal), even as her actor ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) shuffles unhappily in the background. The romance with Harry peaks over dinner at a swanky restaurant. If you played the scene on mute, you’d think Pascal and Johnson were trading Casablanca-level lines, such is the smug look on their faces. There’s some banter about the romance of a date depending on its lavishness (both seem to agree it does). He asks her to rate him as a corpse, since she’d said her job makes her think like a mortician (“A good corpse," she says). She calls him a unicorn (matchmaker term for an unbelievably eligible single man). She goes on about his wealth, how he’s meant for someone younger and posher. "I don't want to date you for your material assets," he replies. “I want to be with you for your intangible assets." 

This is so far from good writing, and yet I can understand people defending it. The scene has the aura of witty, romantic things being said—chic two-shot in profile with her leaning forward and him back, soft, sexy lighting, ersatz jazz changing to something soft and ambiguous to signal that the important part of the conversation has arrived. It also makes some logical sense: she’s a matchmaker, he’s in private equity, of course they’ll talk numbers. The problem is, logic isn’t romantic. Inventory isn’t poetry. This is the moment she’s supposedly swept off her feet and they’re talking like they’ve swallowed a balance sheet.  

The best screwball comedies do their sexiest work with characters who can’t switch off their non-romantic selves. Bringing Up Baby (1938) has Cary Grant’s nerdy paleontologist moaning about misplacing his bone and Katharine Hepburn helping him find it. His Girl Friday (1940) is a romance conducted entirely in rapid-fire newsroom talk. In Materialists, though, all anyone talks about is love, and everyone's insufferable (“Love is the last country, the last ideology… when you’re lost, the answer is simple, just go where love is"). 

Pascal looks great, but Harry is an empty dream—too beautiful, too rich, too respectful. John is a sad sack, but at least there’s some life there; the cliché of a broke actor saying “I’m a beggar for you" has an emotional directness missing in the other romantic declarations. His pathetic earnestness pushes Lucy towards cruelty; she confirms every low opinion he has about his own prospects. For a short spell, Lucy becomes something like the complex, self-doubting Julie in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021)—though it’s one thing to try on someone's shoes, another to walk a mile in them. Song is in such a hurry to redeem Lucy that she interrupts the scene with a mercy mission, by the end of which this thread is entirely lost.   

It’s been clear for some time that Hollywood has lost its feel for writing romance. The genre has been one of the biggest victims of the shrinking space for mid-budget, non-IP films. When I was growing up, big stars would frequently turn up in romcoms; this has become exceedingly rare now. As the films have become less frequent, writers and directors have become less sure-footed. Song’s first film, Past Lives (2023), with its loose, loping narrative and sophisticated visual aesthetic, felt like a possible revival. Materialists is a step back, a return to safer narrative structures with the added pressures of working within the machine (there’s a design-by-committee blandness to the wedding dance scene, carefully curated across racial and sexual demographics).

“You don’t want to marry me," Lucy tells Harry. “You just want to do business with me." “Isn’t marriage a business deal?" he asks. “Yes, but love has to be on the table," Lucy insists. Materialists acts like it’s cynical, but this isn’t an anti-romance. It has the bright, expensive look of a studio romcom, and shares the genre's inherent hopefulness. One suitor is let down easy, the other promises to change . Even the client whose terrible experience with a match sends Lucy into a spiral has to hear a sanctimonious “I promise you, you're going to marry the love of your life" after it’s over. Cave people are having a baby. Lucy gets a flower ring. Love was never off the table.