A perennial and often justified critique of romantic comedy as a genre is that it tends to glide past the nitty-gritty details of its characters’ financial circumstances. Whether it’s the luminous farmhouse kitchens of Nancy Meyers’ boomer heroines or the weirdly remunerative entry-level jobs of countless rom-com protagonists—all those editorial assistants and magazine feature writers ensconced in cute Manhattan one-bedrooms—modern rom-coms have a way of gesturing only in the vaguest fashion at the economic realities of their characters’ lives. Just as people in movies are always 60 to 90 percent better looking than their counterparts in real life would be, there’s generally an assumed upgrade in terms of wardrobes, haircuts, skin care regimens, and above all, living quarters. To some degree, this is what we come to rom-coms for: the fantasy of a relatively frictionless life in which we could all be one meet-cute away from everything falling into place.
The accusation of glossing over the hard numbers is one that could never be levied against Materialists, the romantic comedy that’s the second feature film from Celine Song (Past Lives). The characters themselves freely tell us, and each other, what they’re worth in exact figures: Dakota Johnson’s Lucy, a professional matchmaker at an upscale New York dating service called Adore, makes a respectable but not astronomical $80,000 a year. Harry (Pedro Pascal), the handsome bachelor and private-equity investor she meets at one of her client’s weddings, owns a palatial downtown apartment whose price tag he casually reveals when she asks him about it point-blank: $12 million. As for Lucy’s ex, John (Chris Evans), we see him sharing a cramped apartment with two roommates and balking at Manhattan’s exorbitant parking fees because he doesn’t have the cash in his bank account to afford them; he’s an aspiring theater actor with a day job as a cater waiter, his lack of disposable income rivaled only by his lack of self-esteem.
The love triangle put in place by their early three-way encounter—Lucy and Harry flirting and dancing at that upscale wedding while John serves them drinks, remembering his onetime love’s preferred beverage order with touching accuracy—can’t help but recall the three-sided figure at the center of Past Lives, in which Greta Lee’s Korean American protagonist found herself suspended between her happy marriage to a white American man and an unexpected visit from her former childhood sweetheart from Seoul. But where the Past Lives triangle was complicated by questions of nationality, language, and culture, with Lee’s protagonist forced to confront her dual identity as an immigrant, the tension that develops among Lucy, Harry, and John is generated almost entirely by their differing relationships to money, property, and status.
As Lucy is at pains to point out, first to the clients she counsels at work, then to Harry on their dates to fancy places where he picks up the tab, marriage throughout history has been a business transaction as much as a romantic one. Just as she coldly calculates her clients’ relative value based on a checklist of assets (for women, beauty, youth, and charm; for men, height, handsomeness, and earning potential), she insists, often enough for the audience to begin considering downward-revising her own charm rating, that her personal life choices are governed by the same ruthless math. A flashback to the moment of her breakup with John five years earlier, as they quarreled in the street over the payment of that aforementioned parking fee, makes it clear that Lucy has decided to commit herself only to a partner who can take care of her in the style to which, after starting to date Harry, she will quickly become accustomed.
To its credit, Materialists is not so schematic as to make Pascal’s deep-pocketed suitor the movie’s bad guy. Though he’s wealthy, suave, and outwardly confident, Harry is also touchingly insecure; a revelation late in the film shows what lengths he’s gone to present as the sugar daddy of every woman’s dreams. Evans’ John, on the other hand, is a classic scrub, fully aware that his status as a struggling actor in his late 30s makes him less valuable on the meat market that is the dating scene, but too committed to his career (and still too in love with his unattainable ex) to do much about it. The character who needs to change in order for this dilemma to be resolved is not either one of the men, but the rigidly dogmatic Lucy herself. The chain of events that helps bring about that change is not entirely convincing—and, depending as it does on a plot development involving a traumatic life event for one of Lucy’s matchmaking clients, the change the protagonist undergoes is not altogether morally satisfying for the viewer.
Materialists begins and ends with a playful frame story that shows us a dialogue-free courtship between two prehistoric lovers who exchange flower rings and shy embraces amid the caves and canyons of the Stone Age. Not so much has changed since those days, this device suggests, at least not for those who know how to look past the optimizing calculations of contemporary partner-seeking to remember what love is really about. But this 21st-century heroine’s journey from a profit-maximizing matchmaker (or, as an embittered client played with memorable snap by Zoë Winters calls her, a “pimp”) to a roll-with-the-punches romantic feels more like a story contrivance than like a hard-won transformation.
There’s plenty to enjoy about Materialists, from the sparkling indie soundtrack (Cat Power! Harry Nilsson! John Prine!) to the flattering rose-hued glow of Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, to Lucy’s enviable working-girl wardrobe. (I might be willing to compromise on the flexibility of working from home if I too could stride to a chic office in the West Village in those calf-hugging knee-length boots.) Johnson is perfectly cast as the kind of woman Pascal’s Harry calls a “luxury good,” with her lissome ballerina limbs and impossibly satiny hair. And if Pascal and Evans seem a bit more out of place in their roles—Pascal has an intrinsic warmth and humility that make him ill-suited to play a capitalist master-of-the-universe type, while Evans may simply be too good-looking to pass muster as a lonely schlemiel—they are both charismatic enough to invite the viewer to pose that eternal rom-com question “Which guy should she choose?” The answer Materialists provides is suspended, like the movie, somewhere between keen-eyed satire and swoony romance, making the ending both heartwarming and, if you think about it too long, a tad alienating as well.