Materialists (Celine Song, 2025)
On one hand, Celine Song’s sophomore feature repeatedly pulled me in through its lead actress, the always appealing Dakota Johnson. On the other, this NYC anti-romance is such a wretchedly cynical, tonally confused affair that Johnson’s magnetism almost didn’t matter. The film belabors the obvious about a modern dating world blind to anything other than materialistic concerns, and its world isn’t a convincing one anyways.
As a professional matchmaker, Lucy (Johnson) pairs men and women together with the logic of an algorithm. Taking note of her client’s “non-negotiables” and “nice-to-haves” in a romantic partner, age, height, career, etc., she flatly accepts relationships as mostly practical matters. Throughout “Materialists,” Song never finds the right critical distance from which to consider this core facet of Lucy. The feeling I get is that Song empathizes with Lucy’s pragmatism, and is not interested in excoriating her. The problem is that there’s no discernible emotional identity or context behind Lucy’s jaded exterior. As she’s drawn into a love triangle between John, her broke theater actor ex (Chris Evans, better than usual) and Harry, the wealthy scion to a private equity firm (Pedro Pascal, about as bland as the material he’s given), I had zero sense what she might actually desire in a person. It’s hard to even have an opinion of her relationship with one man over other when there is no distinctive shading to the relationships to speak of.
The film has a painfully simple understanding of what love is not, and seemingly no clue as to what love actually is. When Lucy ultimately gravitates towards her ex, there’s little emotional basis for it. Did I enjoy Johnson’s luminosity, the ease of her gestures and the cadence of her speech? Sure did. Did I make it through the awful sexual-assault sub-plot? Barely.