Sitting around, gabbing about money. There are few more common passtimes. It makes the world go around, after all. Every single scene in Celine Song’s new film, Materialists, is about money. Characters talk about it directly, they talk about it philosphically, they talk about its effects, about having it and not, about their lives as shaped by it. They talk about little else. Even when they’re not literally talking about money, they’re talking about money. Where Past Lives was about the appeal of roads not taken, Materialists is about the thing that so often creates those forks. (Money.)
The clever trick of Materialists is its packaging. Comparisons to James L. Brooks, Nora Ephron, and Nancy Meyers abound, and are apt to a degree. It stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker, providing services to the wealthy in glamorous New York settings. Not one to romanticize love—or anything at all—Lucy finds herself torn between two men and two paths. Pedro Pascal is Henry, the scion of a rich family, charming as hell and monied. The perfect man. A “unicorn,” as Lucy says. Chris Evans is John, in his late thirties and still a struggling actor living in a shared apartment that looks days away from condemnation, with even worse roommates. He is also Lucy’s ex. Both men appear at the wedding of a client, Henry’s brother. The rich best man, and the caterer. There it is, a classic love triangle. Except that Materialists isn’t about love. Not really. It’s about money.
At some point in the film, it’s revealed that despite her high-class appearance, Lucy grew up with little money, and even now only makes about $80,000 per year at a job servicing millionaires and billionaires. Not a bad salary, but this is New York. When it comes to relationships, she’s mostly sworn off dating, having convinced herself she’ll only get involved with someone if she knows there’s a future with them, and that future depends on money. Marrying fabulously rish, perhaps, but what she really needs is the stability. We come to understand later that she and John broke up because they were broke, which put a constant stress on their relationship. Lucy wants to be able to enjoy the finer things in life, at least sometimes, like going to a fancy restaurant for their anniversary without worry. In Henry she finds someone who can take her to fancy restaurants any time, no special occasion necessary, like it’s nothing. His multi-million dollar apartment is a nice bonus.
Among Lucy’s many repreated refrains throughout the film is that “love is easy.” In her line of work, analysing clients tangible qualities for potential matches, love doesn’t really enter into her thinking. That will come if it comes, naturally. Easy. It’s all the rest that stands in the way. A true observation, but hers is a cynical view of romance where courtship and marriage amount to little more than negotiation and transaction. In the same way someone might buy a sports car to make themselves feel valuable, Lucy urges her clients to pursue the match that makes them feel similarly valuable.
Except there’s a difference between feeling valuable and actually being valued. This distinction hangs over the film as it moves through typical rom-com plotting, even as it leans away from the comedic. Song is not Nora Eprhon, nor is she Nancy Meyers. James L. Brooks, maybe, but even then she lacks a certain madcap sensibility. Materialists looks and feels like a rom-com, but it’s not really that. A dramedy, maybe, but I think it does the film no disrespect to simply call it a romance. It is incredibly romantic, and its romance is animated by that question of value. Both men make her feel valued, though, for much of the movie, only Henry has the means to make her feel superficially valuable.
There’s a moment, though, during a scene in which she’s at a party with both her suitors, after having had a uniquely terrible day, when the meaning of value makes itself clear. Both men are amazingly kind and wonderful, but only one of them picks up on the fact that something is wrong, that Lucy is not doing okay. It’s noticing as an expression of love. The easy part. Lucy’s mistake is imagining that love is separate from the overall value of a relationship. After her bad luck experiences, and expressed through how she does her job, she finds value elsewhere, in material things, and not unimportant things necessarily. Dating takes risk, it requires bravery, and Lucy has gotten to a place where her main goal is risk avoidance.
Johnson is, simply, excellent in the film. She wields her trademark detachment as a shield for her character, and slowly over of the course of the movie allows that shield to slip away. Her great asset as an actress is her intelligence, which comes through in the way she always appears to be processing what’s going on in front of her. You see her thinking, and this draws the audience closer. Pascal and Evans are more elemental performers. They convey feeling first, and Song’s script allows them both a measure of humanity to match Lucy’s. Rich guy, poor guy, but neither are cyphers. They have their own motivations and struggles, totally separate from their romantic concerns, and the interplay between all three feels distinctly real, even if the circumstance is like something out of a Hollywood movie.
I loved this movie. I’m not even sure I can adequetely explain why, except to say that it got at something real. The money stuff is all obvious, though the way Song writes, it contains depth. But it’s more than that. It’s in the way characters talk to each other, having intellectual conversations about their situation, breaking down their ideas and behaviours with clarity, yet it’s still so often a front. These are people who don’t actually know themselves, not fully. It’s not an arrogance so much as a blindness, and money only makes it worse. Money turns everything into a transaction, a deal. Lucy believes she can negotiate a solid position for herself in life, and that this will amount to sustenance. She’s lying to herself, but then so is everyone else. The magic of the film is in how it gets each character to the point of realizing that, and then looking inward to understand their value, their worth, in a non-monetary way. It becomes a film about recognizing love in a materialistic world. About accepting it, and being transformed by it. It’s about being brave enough to allowing yourself that feeling of value. Of being valued.