Materialists (2025)
Directed by: Celine Song
Premise: A New York City matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) earns a living setting up wealthy clients. She meets a man who is perfect on paper (Pedro Pascal) but she can’t let go of her broke ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans).
What Works: The greatest strength of Materialists is its brutal honesty. Although it is set in New York City primarily among characters who have an elite level of wealth, Materialists is in touch with this particular cultural moment and many of the conversations happening around courtship, sexuality, and love. In contemporary online spaces there is a lot of talk about potential mates in terms of their “value.” It’s a blatantly economic and cynical paradigm that’s frequently shortsighted. Materialists interrogates this way of conceiving courtship and the film considers how and why people seek romantic partners and why they want to get married; it’s not always for romantic or virtuous reasons. This film makes a convincing case that marriage is, at least in part, an economic decision. But Materialists is also about the folly of reducing people to variables in an equation. The film is set up as a romantic comedy and in fact Materialists would make an interesting double feature with Pretty Woman. However, the filmmakers take the material in a different direction. There is an effective subplot involving one of the matchmaker’s clients played by Zoe Winters. Materialists goes to some dark places and Winters gives the best performance of the movie.
What Doesn’t: The filmmakers betray their brutal honesty in the end. Like a lot of romantic comedies, Materialists is about a love triangle with a woman caught between the safe, affluent, white-collar choice and the economically insecure but more passionate blue-collar choice. It’s a contrived dramatic construction seen in many, many romantic comedies. It’s not done very well here. For a romantic triangle to work, the choice has to be compelling but in this case it’s not. That’s indicative of a larger problem of Materialists. The movie is emotionally flat. Everyone speaks in the same cadence and volume. No one raises their voice or even shows emotion. Love stories are about romance and passion. There’s just none of that here. This staid approach could work for the movie if the filmmakers stuck to their ideas and took the story in a subversive and interesting direction, which they are poised to do. Instead, they give in to sentimental ideas that don’t make sense and are not consistent with the characters. The dialogue is often on the nose, with the characters explaining exactly what they are feeling.
Bottom Line: Materialists is a compromised movie. The filmmakers set out to undermine romantic comedy tropes with a dose of harsh reality but they ultimately succumb to those tropes. The film doesn’t really satisfy either as a romantic comedy or as a drama.
Episode: #1053 (June 22, 2025)