‘Materialists’ is a modern successor to the true spirit of Jane Austen
Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans elevate one of the most thoughtful romantic comedies in years
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One of my favorite Hollywood quirks is seeing franchise stars use their powers for artistic good. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson lent their Twilight clout to their favorite auteurs; Daniel Radcliffe leaned into absurdist comedy and Broadway musicals; and Dakota Johnson has decided to use her Fifty Shades of Grey cache to singlehandedly save romantic comedies. From the big budget gloss of my beloved How to Be Single to the indie charms of my even more beloved Cha Cha Real Smooth, Johnson has long been devoted to rom-coms in all their forms. Now she’s back at it again in A24’s Materialists, one of the most high-profile, heavily advertised big screen romances in years.
It helps that Johnson has two other franchise stars by her side. In between superhero projects, Chris Evans has long been his own rom-com enthusiast and even directed one himself (2014’s Before We Go), while Pedro Pascal seems to realize that if he had gotten famous earlier, he would’ve been a thriving early aughts rom-com leading man in the vein of Dermot Mulroney or Matthew McConaughey. They’re three actors who actually want to be working in the genre, which is rare enough in its own right. And they’ve found the perfect collaborator in Celine Song, the writer/director who burst onto the scene with the 2023 critical favorite, Oscar-nominated romance Past Lives.
The best way to describe Materialists is that it’s more conventional than you might expect based on Past Lives’ intimate maturity and yet also less conventional than its marketing would have you think—more thoughtful romantic dramedy than sparkling rom-com confection. Before we get a classic “getting ready” montage to meet our business-minded heroine, the film starts so far back in time that you might think you’ve accidentally wandered into the wrong theater for a few minutes. And even once it jumps to the present, Materialists offers thornier wrinkles than you might expect from a classic story of head vs. heart.
Ostensibly, the film is a love triangle between cynical professional matchmaker Lucy (Johnson), her broke aspiring actor ex John (Evans), and her rich, dashing client Harry (Pascal). In practice, however, the boys are very much supporting players here. Song and Johnson understand that the rom-com genre has long been a haven for women-centric stories that don’t get told elsewhere. So they use Lucy to reflect on the interiority of single women in their mid-30s and beyond, struggling to balance the sky-high dreams of what they want in a partner with the reality of the men who are interested in them, all while dealing with the external and internal pressure put on all of us in the image-driven social media age.
For her part, Lucy is deeply cynical about relationships, if not entirely unhopeful about love. Working with a rich, anxious clientele, her day-to-day job involves lowering the hopes of female clients looking for, well, “a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” all while coddling her 40-something male clients who only want her to pair them with fit 20-something women who won’t challenge their opinions. Coupled with the fact that her own parents’ marriage ended over fights about money, Lucy has learned to think transactionally. Falling in love is easy, she claims, but marriage is a business transaction in which both parties are trying to find their equal market value; pure math and nothing more. Her plan is to find the richest man she can who doesn’t treat her like shit and lock him down so she never has to worry about money again.
In that way, Materialists is a successor not to the glossy rom-coms of the early 2000s, but to the classic literary coming-of-age romances that so many of us grew up on. Lucy’s mix of aspiration, independence, and secret vulnerability makes her a perfect hybrid of Meg, Jo, and Amy from Little Women. And Materialists’ blend of satirical bluntness and earnest romanticism makes it a much worthier heir to the works of Jane Austen than that ill-advised Persuasion adaptation Johnson starred in a few years ago. Where contemporary rom-coms often ignore real-life practicalities in favor of sweeping grand gestures, our earliest rom-com source material was much more clear-eyed about the pragmatic realities of happily ever after and how those realities impact women in particular. Materialists continues that theme in a 21st century context.
In Austen terms, Lucy is a sort of Emma Woodhouse/Charlotte Lucas mix—haughtily self-righteous but also anxiously pragmatic and a bit self-loathing. Johnson’s signature dry wit becomes a kind of armor Lucy wears to tackle the world without getting hurt by it, even as there’s clearly an enormous well of empathy at her center too. (Johnson can be both spiky and soft as a performer, and this movie takes great advantage of that duality.) Lucy claims that the most important thing in a relationship is to be made to feel valuable—like a luxury good to be coveted. Yet it’s clear that what she’s really craving from life is a sense of safety, not just financially but emotionally too.
In fact, the most moving relationship in the film isn’t between Lucy and either of her guys, but with her client Sophie (Zoë Winters)—who’s basically the Harriet Smith to her meddling Emma. Through Sophie we see the harshest realities of what dating as a woman in her late 30s can be like and the importance of friendship in those moments. And we also get to see cracks in the icy facade that Lucy has put up as a coping mechanism in both her personal and professional life. If Materialists is first and foremost a character study for Lucy, how she interacts with the women in her life is just as important as the men wooing her.
Never fear, however, there are plenty of great romantic moments as well, with John and Harry both playing the golden retriever to Lucy’s black cat—even if Pascal’s Harry is the only one with the true purebred pedigree. Crucially, however, Harry isn’t just a dashing prince charming but a true intellectual equal when it comes to Lucy’s frank, cynical worldview. He’s wealthy, confident, and reserved in a way that calls to mind Mr. Darcy—complete with a palatial home for Lucy to gawk at in awe. John, meanwhile, seems to understand her on a cellular level (early on, she even admits he’s probably her soulmate), but the gap between what they both want out of life seems too insurmountable to cross.
Of course, the trendy thing is to say you would obviously pick cultured Pascal over basic bitch Evans, but that presupposes you didn’t imprint on The Perfect Score as a 14-year-old girl. Both male leads understand exactly what their roles demand of them and exactly how to play their respective romantic archetypes. But as a long-time connoisseur of Evans’ rom-com oeuvre, I was particularly impressed watching him tap into a sense of softboy decency as well as he’s ever done it.
Though it doesn’t seem like a leading man as hot and successful as Evans should be able to play anxious and vulnerable, it’s an undervalued skill in his actorly toolbox. In between his entitled jerk roles (i.e. Knives Out, Scott Pilgrim), Evans conveys quiet, self-aware longing with the best of them. And the sense of old-fashioned decency that made him such a great Captain America is key to his rom-com work too. There’s a scene in Materialists where John stops to answer a phone call that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I saw the movie. Grand gestures are well and good, but it’s the small ones that can really make or break a rom-com. (Just ask the hand flex from Pride & Prejudice.)
As in the best love triangles, however, you could see either man or perhaps no man at all providing a kind of happily ever after for Lucy. There are shades of La La Land and (500) Days of Summer to the quiet melancholy of Materialists, not to mention more than a little dose of Broadcast News and Sleeping with Other People. And though there’s occasionally something a bit stilted about the film’s talky, contemplative approach to love, the upside is a romance that blossoms with maturity. Materialists paints a clear-eyed portrait of reality without entirely losing hope about fairy tale happy endings too. And we can thank Johnson (and Song, Evans, and Pascal) for keeping the genre alive to explore those ideas for years to come.
Grade: B+
Materialists opens in theaters this Friday, June 13.
Past Lives was my favorite movie of 2023 so I’m very excited to see this, but the marketing has been pretty bland, making it seem like a more conventional rom com. Hearing your thoughts, I’m hopeful it will be better than that!
I still haven't gotten around to Past Lives so this was the kick I needed to get on top of buying a Materialists ticket! One of my favorite things about Love & Friendship is how it constantly reminds you that the stakes are whether Susan and Frederica will literally have a roof over their heads, without ever being less than incredibly funny.