[Editor’s note: The following story contains spoilers for “Materialists,” particularly its ending.]
“Materialists” has more on its mind than your standard-issue romantic dramedy: It’s a cutting exploration of modern dating and how impoverished it can be, with Celine Song‘s latest A24 collaboration using IRL matchmaking as a smart (and more cinematic) template for her inquiries rather than making the film swipe-centric.
Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, whose $80,000-a-year Manhattan matchmaking job at the company Adore has outfitted her with a hardened cynicism toward dating and romance, about how we as single humans turn ourselves into value-based merchandise to make ourselves more desirable. Her last meaningful relationship was with struggling theater actor John (Chris Evans), who’s been an ex for some time and with whom things ended badly amid disagreements over money and the future, until she meets financier Harry (Pedro Pascal) at a client’s wedding. They fall into a fast, glossy fling, over martinis and into Harry’s outrageously expensive penthouse, after she initially sizes him up as a possible client, insisting she’s not hitting on him at that wedding when she asks about his height and income.
Lucy, after eventually breaking off with Harry once she confronts how there’s little spark here and just before a planned trip to Iceland, ultimately reunites with John. He’s long still held a candle, imagining a future for the two of them, while feeling inadequate about his financial status and lack of a proverbial dowry, little to offer but his deep feelings. (Lucy, a failed actress, also has many debts.)
But Lucy’s breakup with Harry also coexists with the reality check that Harry is not the dating-market unicorn she thought. He’s revealed to have undergone a leg-lengthening procedure to make himself taller, a rather grim and body-horror-like phenomenon apparently, increasingly endemic to the modern dating world, which Lucy earlier joked about with a colleague (Dasha Nekrasova). It’s another illustration of how we commodify and objectify ourselves for the sake of hoped-for partnership, which is one of Song’s main interests in this deceptively romantic movie that concludes sunnily, but with an ellipsis if you’re looking carefully.
“Materialists” wraps up with a quote-unquote Hollywood ending, John proposing to Lucy in an idyllic pocket of Central Park at the same time she’s just been offered a major promotion to run Adore — and a blank check in terms of salary potential. It’s a promotion she’s unsure she will take, a decision left ambiguous in the script.
“For a Hollywood ending, the line at the end of the film, the final line, and the line that is meant to be the most romantic line is, ‘How’d you like to make a very bad financial decision?,’” Song told IndieWire, referencing how John sets up his marriage proposal. “You never know, and that’s why it ends in a marriage bureau [the film’s true last shot]. We don’t know how many of those marriages that happen in City Hall, how many are going to work. But we know in the news that 50 percent of them will fail. If you ask me what’s going to happen to Lucy and John, it’s 50-50. Unless either of them reaches a different tier in their class — if Lucy takes the promotion, or John catches a slightly bigger break — their chances of staying together would drop further. Maybe a miracle will still happen, where they are so moved by their love, and so in love, that they’re going to be able to move through it, which is the other 50 percent of those marriages that survive.”
The last shot of “Materialists,” as the credits begin, is of a bustling marriage hall at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan, a mundane image in stark, back-to-Earth contrast with that Central Park moment, which is visually straight out of a more traditional rom-com but is itself a business proposal. We then see marriage licenses being filed at City Hall, Lucy and John’s among them, as cheap supermarket balloons bobble, and Japanese Breakfast’s aptly titled original song “My Baby (Got Nothing at All)” plays and “Materialists” ends.
“I wanted it to be like the DMV, which it is. You want it to look like a security-camera DMV. That’s kind of how City Hall is. I got married in City Hall,” said Song, whose husband is screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. “It’s both the most romantic place on Earth and the least romantic place on Earth. That contradiction I was so interested in. Everybody who wants to get married in New York City, they have to go there. It’s such a special experience. You’re sitting there. You take a number. It’s like a deli counter. It really feels like you’re at Katz’s or something… You pay the [$35], you get a witness, and then you just wait on coffee-stained couches. I always knew that the movie would end there, because what’s so romantic about that place is that it’s very connected to the caveman stuff.”
Song’s film also begins and ends full circle with a bookend of images of a primordial courtship exchange from cave times, two early homo sapiens agreeing to a Paleolithic version of a formal union wordlessly.
“We know that these tools have passed from one area to another. We have a historical record of that. What we don’t know is what passed between those two people,” Song said. “The thing I’m really interested in is the tangible records of marriage. Every historian will tell you the most reliable record is the marriage record. One of the best ways to track historical figures and history in general is a marriage record. Now, everybody’s there with some equality about how these two people got married, but what we don’t know is what their marriage was like. Maybe some were abusive. Maybe some were so lifelong and beautiful. Maybe some of them, some people fell out of love or grew into love. Not to mention queer love, which has no record. But whatever passed between them, there’s no historical record, but what passed between them was not insubstantial just because it’s not on the pages with the straight couples. There’s a tangible record of this thing we’re all doing, that is bureaucratic, material, that is going to last through time. But the point of it, especially now, is what passes between two people, which is this intangible thing.”
Also, think about the fact that Lucy and John starting over again is partly brought to a head by the unraveling crisis with her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), who earlier in the film tells Lucy, “I’m not merchandise. I’m a person,” when yet another matchmaking setup goes sour. Sophie is later sexually assaulted by one of Lucy’s matches, Mark P. (the voice of “Past Lives” star John Magaro), leading her to break off ties with Adore and Lucy while threatening legal action.
Post-Harry-breakup, Lucy, with nowhere to go, having sublet the apartment she can barely afford anyway, crashes an Upstate New York wedding with John — his cater-waiter job gets them in there. After a dance and a kiss and freighted promises are exchanged, Lucy receives a call from Sophie that Mark is now stalking her outside her apartment. Lucy and John speed back to the city to Sophie’s place, where Lucy stays the night to comfort her former client while John waits on the stoop outside until morning, leading to the come-to-Jesus (and rushed by any pragmatist’s standards) agreement to get back together.
“Even if Lucy and John don’t make it, we know what passed between them on that stoop, that dance, we know that was real. For the cave people, that flower ring was real, too. So what do we actually think is the real thing?,” Song said. “Have we become so completely wrapped up in the numbers and the algorithm… that that’s the thing we consider is more real than true love?”
Underneath the film’s at times slicker, more satisfying rom-dram beats, Song is ever probing like an enthnographer how dehumanizing the dating world can be, which leads to the film’s most grimly funny slapstick moment: Harry confessing to Lucy, mid-breakup, about the leg surgery that made him six inches taller, and still leaves him with scars he will have to answer to maybe forever. Standing in his pristine kitchen, he lowers himself six inches to show what he used to look like. (The average cost of this surgery averages $75,000 or more. It involves the breaking of bones, among other horrors.)
“We see the way [the dating market] affects Harry too, that throughout the film we think was above it or beat the game. He has everything he wants, and we’re like, no, it’s crushing Harry as much as everyone else, this dating market. When he gets that surgery, the thing about that surgery is, how can you say this is how the value system works, and how can you blame him for making that investment?,” Song said.
Read more about how “Materialists” peels back the commodified self-deceptions of the dating market in IndieWire’s earlier interview with Song here.
“Materialists” is now in theaters from A24.
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