By Webster’s Dictionary defines a “Love Triangle” as “a situation in which one member of a couple is involved in a love affair with a third person.”
If you’ve made it to the second line of this review, I appreciate your confidence—yes, that’s a strikingly stupid way to start any piece of writing, let alone a critique of Celine Song’s much-anticipated PAST LIVES follow up, MATERIALISTS. But I feel confident having seen her last two movies that if Song was reading this, she’d probably stand and clap, and perhaps even take some notes for whatever screenplay she’s cooking up next. If that opening would be good enough for Academy Award nominee Celine Song, surely it can be good enough for you and I.
It’s particularly hard with MATERIALISTS to not begin by simply wondering aloud all the things the movie could’ve been rather than what it actually was. But, on its face, MATERIALISTS has been sold as a love triangle of some kind, with its A-List stars discussing that idea in every interview and press opportunity possible (the definition is just a few lines up if you forgot). Yet it never resembles, nor does it ever aspire to be, a film exploring someone caught between two lovers. Instead, it’s a kind of sterile anti-romance built for TikTok scrollers who love fantasy-romance books and the middle-aged, hopeless sentimentalists it’s (trying to) depict. It brazenly opens upon a groomed caveman proposing to a cavewoman, the kind of blank check confidence a Best Original Screenplay nomination will give you, and only somehow spirals into further nonsense from there.
Even if you liked PAST LIVES (we didn’t), it always seemed like Song would be over her skis with a kind of throwback screwball rom-com, no matter what era of Hollywood she would be theoretically trying to mine. When MATERIALISTS was announced as her next project, the plot and casting certainly gave people pause, but I suppose in asking what the movie could’ve been, it’s hard to not ponder what a script that actually was a love triangle between three of Hollywood’s most beautiful actors—Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans—would look like. Powered by a trio of the most director and script-dependent stars we have (with enough great movies between the lot to count on only two hands), the results of a traditional glitzy studio comedy would’ve probably been, well, bad. I suppose there’s something nostalgic these days to creating something so straightforward—even the initial trailer for MATERIALISTS promised such antiquated, but potentially charming delights. And I’m on record all over this very site advocating for a return to the simple, mass appeal, joke-laden rom-com—won’t someone please think of TBS programming, please—but this isn’t it.
Song is instead becoming Nora Ephron for a braindead cohort of young romantics, people who hear Evans drop the line “I’m a beggar for you” in his final impassioned speech and already have a second ticket to the theater booked so they can film the movie screen and post it to corners of social media I hope to never find. It’s, to be sure, a bad script (remember how I mentioned it opens on cavepeople proposing to each other), but it also feels carefully built to be chopped and slopped for Instagram Reels, each scene centered around long, “emotionally intellectual” monologues that functionally offer very little for a frictionless plot.
Much like PAST LIVES, there is little in the way of conflict in MATERIALISTS. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a successful New York City matchmaker who somehow only makes $80k per year. Lucy is excellent at her job, having landed nine marriages in a matter of years at the company, but is naturally forever single. At a wedding of one of her past clients, she meets Harry (Pascal), a private equity millionaire who is the brother of the groom and is immediately interested in her. But, and I’m sure you think you know where this is going, she also runs into her ex boyfriend, a broke actor named John (Evans), who is catering the same wedding.
I’d love to say this is the point at which shenanigans ensue, but MATERIALISTS isn’t really a film about anything, let alone shenanigans. At its core, the choice between Harry and John is one of being wealthy or being happy. But Song’s script never forces Lucy to make that choice. There is no love triangle, as there is no overlap between her dating both men. Lucy’s arrived conclusion to not date or possibly marry Harry comes amidst a bombshell realization that Harry has had, and I’m dead serious as I type this spoiler, a surgery in which he’s broken his legs to become taller, a trend you no doubt read about during COVID. By becoming taller, he has made himself more desirable in the dating pool (a thing that wouldn’t have been possible being a millionaire and having Pedro Pascal’s face). Much of the film’s framing of the matchmaking industry writ large is boiling people down to attributive numbers and figures on a spreadsheet with height naturally being a much desired indicator, and yet… Lucy learning passively via scars on his legs and recalling a conversation she’s had about the leg surgery with Dasha fucking Nekrasova at the beginning of the film was a real plot point a woman who was nominated for an Academy Award just two years ago came up with.
Song’s script, at every turn, is failing whatever MATERIALISTS could’ve been. Somewhere within this mess is the notion that Lucy’s own dating life and the way she views her clients dating lives might clash, but it never quite gets there. The film cheaps out of trying to actually learn any lesson about her job via her own relationships and instead drops a surreal subplot with an offscreen sexual assault on one of her clients (played by Zoë Winters, who is giving the film’s best performance by a mile). In dozens of various soliloquies, we watch Lucy talk about the “math” of the dating process—the cold, hard truth that often what people are looking for at a certain age is a series of boxes to be checked based on numbers alone. The assault becomes, and I feel insane even typing this, a way for Song to force Lucy to confront the idea that love can’t always be found via an Excel file of connections, and that you don’t always know who someone is based only on age, height, and salary alone. Sometimes, those people with the right age, height, and salary end up being predators. I mean, what the fuck are we doing here?
The most confounding issue therein is just how unsentimental MATERIALISTS actually is. If huge plot points built around leg-breaking surgeries and sexual assault allegations don’t kill the momentum, the movie’s vicious inability to just be romantic in any capacity is the final nail in the coffin. In the aforementioned speech John gives Lucy at the end of the movie, professing his undying love for her, Song is trying and absolutely failing to give Chris Evans his WHEN HARRY MET SALLY moment; in attempting to combine many of Billy Crystal’s excellent speeches into one, she misunderstands just what makes the shared history of Harry and Sally’s relationship allow that final speech to hit. No New Year’s Eve profession that saccharine should ever work, but we’ve seen the will-they-won’t-they go on for years in Reiner’s film. John’s words are predicated on one flashback early in the film and nothing else, and Song can’t even allow them to wallow in his desperate plea for love before yanking the two out of it to pivot to a sudden stalker component of the insane sexual assault plotline. Commit or don’t!
Twenty years ago, Lucy would’ve learned her lessons about love the good ol’ fashioned way, where we watch as Harry’s commitment to buying fried chicken fast food restaurants and stripping them for parts (or whatever he does in private equity) outweighs his commitment to her as a partner, and she eventually realizes the poor broke actor who looks like Chris Evans is ultimately the happier way forward. We’ve seen that movie before. We’ve even laughed at that movie before. MATERIALISTS is not that movie. MATERIALISTS is a movie where Dakota Johnson has to say that she would sometimes “do pot” at a party. MATERIALISTS is a movie where Evans hears the 1978 Johnny Thunders’ single “You Can’t Put Your Arms Round A Memory” and looks at Johnson and goes, “Remember this song” while he turns it up before taking a beat as she sullenly looks at him and goes, “Of course I do.” MATERIALISTS is a movie where in a sincere breakup sequence Pascal drops, “I’m having a hard time believing it’s not the leg thing” as justification of said breakup. MATERIALISTS is just flat-out fucking bad.
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