The math in Celine Song’s ‘Materialists’ doesn’t add up

Celine Song’s romantic drama Materialists, which is the sequel to her brilliant debut Past Lives, has a great scene that has absolutely nothing to do with romance. When Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker to the wealthiest and most desperate people in New York City, attends the lavish wedding of Charlotte, a client for whom she was successful in finding a partner, it does touch on the subject of romantic feelings—or their conspicuous absence. Or so she believed: Lucy is called backstage to Charlotte’s room and discovers her strewn across the bed in her wedding gown, inconsolable; the bride is embarrassed that she, a successful and self-reliant woman, has succumbed to the conventional marriage industrial complex.

When Lucy calmly tells Charlotte that she is not required to do anything she does not want to do, she asks her what initially drew her to her future husband. Charlotte admits that her sister, who is married to a less successful and wealthy man, is jealous of this outrageously wealthy man. Lucy instantly deciphers what Charlotte is actually saying, like a therapist: “He makes you feel valuable.”. “..”.

A timeless story, Materialists is about seeking love in a material world, as the title suggests. This type of story is the only way that hardened cynics like Lucy can understand romantic relationships in terms of capitalism: unmarried people are judged by how “competitive” they are in “the market,” the most ostensibly desirable people (wealthy, “fit,” and of a certain age) are “unicorns,” and marriage compatibility is viewed as an equation where “the math has to add up.”. A modern anxiety that is frequently expressed in opinion pieces, relationship podcasts, dating shows, and daily life is reflected in that scene at Charlotte’s wedding. Some women feel that they must balance their progressive ideals with the expectations of a capitalist society and the desire to lean toward heteronormativity in their romantic endeavors. Song seems to be expressing that some women secretly worry that the call is coming from within the home — that they are truly that basic and heteronormative. The pressure to partner up for financial security is still, to some extent, just as external as it was during Jane Austen’s time.

The primary romance of Materialists, Lucy’s own love life, is presented by Song in a way that familiarly and unsuccessfully imitates these conflicting desires. Similar to innumerable fictional white women before her, Lucy is caught between two suitors who have very different financial backgrounds. Harry (Pedro Pascal), her prince, is behind door number one. He is an older, rich private equity man who is eager to win her over and take her to his $12 million penthouse. On the same night that she meets Harry, her ex-boyfriend and pauper, John (played by Chris Evans), shows up at door number two. While pursuing acting, John works as a caterer and waiter and lives with unclean roommates. Lucy ended their relationship some time ago because she couldn’t see herself with someone who was likely constantly checking their bank account to make sure it wasn’t overdrawn.

Using a cosmopolitan playwright, her American husband, and the childhood crush she left behind in Korea years ago, Song’s semi-autobiographical Past Lives subverted the traditional dramatic structure of the love triangle to tell a complex story about migration, ambition, and grief for what-could-have-been. Conversely, Materialists doesn’t deviate from the norm and concludes precisely as one might anticipate. A well-traveled journey can still soar on the strength of clever banter and sparks between its leads, so this predictability isn’t a fatal flaw.

However, Song lacks the ability to envision a romantic connection between Johnson and her on-screen suitors. The plot is a major problem; like her client Charlotte, Lucy struggles with her desire to live a luxurious life devoid of passion or true love, to the point where her attraction to either of these men is almost unfathomable. She admires Harry’s boundless wealth with him. She challenges his interest in her, however, as they eat at upscale restaurants and tries to persuade him that he is capable of doing better—that is, younger, more attractive, and having wider hips for giving birth. (All right, that last one was a fabrication, but from what I recall, she does mention that, as a woman in her 30s, her window for becoming a mother is quickly closing. And in order to push John away, she uses inverse reasoning: “I’m obsessed with money, I’m cold … I’m awful,” she claims, while the rest of us in the audience nod angrily in agreement. “How could you still love me when you’re weighing these s*** tradeoffs against being with me?”.

Although the screenplay demands that Lucy eventually soften her edges and decide to date by the end of the film, she is at least refreshingly self-aware. The film concludes by introducing a poorly thought-out B-plot that implies Lucy has found romantic clarity and redemption through the tragic misfortune of a tertiary character.

Song would need a versatile performer who can sell Lucy’s messiness as well as her amazing internal leaps and bounds if she were to make any of this work, let alone suspend your disbelief that she earns $80K a year before taxes while living in a nice apartment in New York City without roommates or assistance from a benefactor, whether familial or otherwise. When Lucy is working and interacting with clients who have ridiculously high (and frequently sexist) dating expectations, Johnson’s cold distance, which is frequently evident in highly memed interviews, works well. (This is another area of dating that Song excels at, and she enjoys a few montages on this front. However, when Lucy’s intended purpose is to flirt or reveal her soul, the icyness melts into flatness. Thousands of miles away, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo’s characters in Past Lives have a far more heated Skype conversation than Johnson ever has with Pascal or Evans.

Another scene jumps out as a potential example of a more unique and intriguing curio. The idea that we all have the fundamental need to be deemed attractive by others, regardless of our financial situation, is supported by Harry’s disclosure of something fundamentally odd about himself: the extent he has gone to in search of love, or something similar. It’s simple to see Song’s motivation for writing Materialists, which challenges our values and self-perceptions through characters who approach partnering so clinically, as though it were a problem that needed to be solved. However, even though the ultimate goal appears to be to critique such painstaking calculations, the conclusion is inevitably cynical and regressively binary. It’s the sort of movie that speaks to the present without making any attempt to relate its observations to any sort of dramatic tension.

Like Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey or Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, Materialists has the potential to be a significant time capsule in the future, preserving the memories of dating problems that a very particular group of millennials and younger people have for earlier generations. However, its worth as a romantic tale to swoon over appears questionable.