Dating standards are a sort of half-taboo. We put our preferences on the apps—age, education level, etc.—but don’t talk about them so much when we’re
Dating standards are a sort of half-taboo. We put our preferences on the apps—age, education level, etc.—but don’t talk about them so much when we’re out in the real world. One of the strange pleasures of Celine Song’s fresh film, Materialists, is how it airs such semi-private wants and hangups for all to see, with sober clarity and wry humor.
The film, which arrives in theaters June 13, has been sold in its trailers as a gentle romantic comedy. The comedy certainly is there, in Song’s mordant sociological survey of the pretenses and prejudices of a certain New York City caste. But the film is really more of a drama of ideas, about the push and pull between passion and practicality.
Dakota Johnson, dehydrated yet soulful, plays Lucy, a thirtysomething Manhattanite who works at a high-class matchmaking service. She consults her clients—largely straight, single, professional women over 30—in the therapeutic, affirmational tones of a culture gone all-in on the dubious wisdom of lifestyle gurus. But Lucy’s analyses are not only bromides meant to keep clients on the hook. There is also a bracing honesty in how she manages the wishlists of her lovelorn customers; blunt talk about money and physical appearance fills Materialists. It may seem shallow until you remember just how profoundly significant those things are to so many people—most people, one might even argue.
The topical boldness of Materialists is intriguingly complemented by its gauzy, gorgeous styling. Just as in Song’s exquisite debut feature Past Lives, Materialists conjures an alluring and wistful summertime New York City. It’s a place where real romance bumps up against fantasy; the door to a dream life seems to be just around every corner, hiding in the low lithe of tony restaurants and lavishly appointed wedding venues. This is the Manhattan that Lucy’s clients imagine for themselves: elegant and gliding, sophisticated but basic.
The harder, more sordid, less fair aspects of dating life stand in stark contrast to all that tasteful refinement. The women in Lucy’s orbit are, among other things, obsessed with and quite immovable about men’s heights, as is the film itself. It all starts to feel a little mean—though I’m told it’s also a fairly right representation of what straight dating is actually like when the niceties have been stripped away. Song is not just making a joke about this particular preoccupation; the film’s disarming frankness is aimed, I think, at catharsis. It can be an awful relief to hear someone say the serene part out thunderous, to acknowledge the sorry and unkind truth of things.
I’d happily watch Song noodle around with the callous vagaries of upper-class New York dating, in her edged and slightly presentational dialogue, for a whole movie. But the demands of a commercially released film are higher than that, and thus Materialists must have a story. It involves Lucy falling in with a suave, wealthy finance guy—Harry, played with intriguing softness by Pedro Pascal. He is not the haughty jerk we expect him to be, and Lucy is powerless against not just his charms, but also the dawning opportunity dangling before her, a brass ring suddenly within reach. Their storybook affair is soon complicated by the reemergence of Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans, in standard charm mode), a barely working actor whose chronic money problems chased Lucy away some years ago.
In narrowing her focus, Song compacts her film’s engaging dimensions into a basic triangle. The dreamy-inquisitive spell is broken as Materialists grows sodden, too literal, arriving an ultimately pat conclusion. Song wishes a blanket statement of good luck to anyone out there searching for a mate, and in essence urges them to simply follow their heart. The importance of money and looks and all that is somberly, even bitterly acknowledged, but is also waved away. By the end, one misses the steely pragmatism of the film’s beginnings.
There is at least one engaging side development in the film’s narrative, which features a terrific turn from Succession’s Zoe Winters and pushes Materialists toward hard questions about the nature of Lucy’s work. She, a failed actor, has been playing a role, projecting a certainty about the mechanics of human interaction based on stereotypes and broad assumptions. Lucy peddles a delusion, well-intentioned as she often is in selling that hokum. The box-checking packaging of potential matches misses a lot; Lucy cannot really meaningfully or thoroughly vouch for any of these candidates.
Were those dim implications more fully explored, Materialists might have become a fascinatingly bleak, cruel vision of heteronormativity akin to the nasty (and perhaps ultimately misplaced) thrill of early Neil LaBute. But Materialists banks away from such harshness at the last minute, turning back toward the airier sentiment it seems to prefer.
There is still much to savor in the film. Lush visual aesthetics are enriched by a lovely soundscape, from composer Daniel Pemberton and from the sound design team, who so carefully and artfully articulate tingly brushes of skin on fabric, city noise fading and giving way to the milky hush of a serene moment pregnant with meaning. Materialists is successfully seductive, eventually revealing a few potential deal-breakers but otherwise proving an engaging date. I wanted to fall in love, as I had with Past Lives. But a diverting, heady fling will do too.
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