Materialists is supposed to be somewhere between an elevated romantic drama and an elevated romantic comedy. Or maybe we just think it should be elevated because it’s from the director of one of the most acclaimed considerations of the wistfulness and vagaries of love in the past ten years, 2023’s Past Lives.

Where oh where is the Celine Song from that movie?

The romantic drama part is that the characters consider Very Seriously the “hard truths” about love and relationships, that they are often the result of doing maths, ticking boxes and finding matches. That should come as no surprise in a movie where the lead is an actual professional matchmaker. (A matchmaker who can’t sort out her own love life? What a twist!) That’s Lucy, played by an actress so charming and likable (Dakota Johnson) that you might spend every moment of Materialists wondering what she’s doing here.

The romantic comedy part is that the movie includes montages of bad clients of the matchmaking service, whose every self-delusional and entitled demand reveals their utter vapidity (that old chestnut). Then there’s also the part that Lucy’s true match, her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), is a poor struggling actor whose roommates engage in one manner of broad bad roommate behaviour after another, like leaving used condoms lying in the middle of the floor.

If it sounds like Materialists is an uneven mix of tones, that’s putting it kindly. But by containing much more of the former than the latter, it also manages to be lugubrious, wasting a third talented and charming actor (Pedro Pascal). Pascal plays a really rich guy considered in the matchmaking industry as a unicorn, a 10 out of 10 in all the boxes his potential female suitors want ticked. After Past Lives, you can’t blame Johnson, Evans and Pascal for thinking Song might be a 10 out of 10 talent to work with, but the term “sophomore slump” is real.

We learn next to nothing about the inner lives of these three characters, but we can tell you that the story starts with Lucy celebrating the ninth wedding that’s a product of her matchmaking skills, which is apparently the occasion for throwing her a big party that includes a cake with sparklers on top. At said wedding, she sees John working for the catering service, his continuing attempt to make ends meet as he doggedly pursues his acting career. Sparks almost fly, and not just from the cake, but Lucy also meets Harry that night, and gives him her card as a way of recruiting him. He’s already got his next match in mind, and she’s standing right in front of him.

This plot synopsis sounds, on the surface, about as mid as you can possibly get for a writer-director who poured her heart, her soul and her Korean heritage into her crowd- and critic-pleasing Past Lives. But surely there’s something deeper beyond that, isn’t there?

There isn’t, though this movie thinks there is, and that’s an ugly look. Its apparent bold stroke is to be honest about materialism, as you might assume from the title, which is that for a very long time – too long, really – Lucy openly admits to wanting to marry a rich man, and for breaking up with John because he wasn’t one. That’s not good enough for our protagonist.

The whole thing exists in a sort of late-90s idea of New York City, the jobs people who live there might have, and the conventional beauty standards of a primarily white cast. (Some movies just happen to have white characters, and other movies feel white. This is the latter.)

Song’s dialogue conveys all this shockingly. It is entirely lacking in eccentric moments or specific references. When John says he’s in a play, something that gets mentioned about five times, never once does Lucy ask what play it is or what it’s about. Song is content for everything to exist on the level of a thesis statement, though what the thesis is, we can’t be sure, despite countless repetitions of familiar buzzwords. Everything is a callback to something said earlier, which is clever if you use it sparingly. After a point, Materialists is nothing but callbacks, but we didn’t like these thoughts the first time they came up, much less now.

The less said about the sub plot involving Lucy’s client, Sophie (Zoe Winters), the better, though this is a movie review, so not saying things is not our forte. Without spoiling a movie that has not earned this courtesy, let’s just say a huge amount of guilt and recrimination is heaped on Lucy for hooking Sophie up with a match who ends up assaulting her.

That a service like this would vet someone the best they could, with the client’s assumption of risk understood, should go without saying, yet Song tries to mine significant emotional material from this apparent dereliction of duty. Like some other unfortunate moments, including the secret Harry is hiding, the execution verges on laughable. (Producing further giggles: the clients of both genders are referred to by their first name and last initial, so when you hear someone refer to the accused assailant, “Mark P.,” for a moment you think you’re watching Severance.)

We all understand that directors with a big critical hit get offered more money and more resources to make their next movie. At least this is in the same vicinity of Song’s previous movie, unlike when they asked Chloe Zhao to make a Marvel movie. But the tone-deaf gross materialism of a movie that purports to be a critique of materialism is unsightly and totally unaware of itself. Materialists is shallow and dispiriting.

 

Materialists is currently playing in cinemas.