Modern love
At first, Materialists seems like a brutal reckoning with our metric-obsessed age. But director Celine Song has bigger themes in mind.
Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans in Materialists. (Photo courtesy of A24)
If you have not been dating lately, the new romantic comedy Materialists (directed by Celine Song) will likely make you exceedingly grateful for that fact. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker whose clients come with a long list of demands for their perfect partner—height, weight, income, hobbies, even hair and eye color. They are all well-paid professionals who are too busy—or too burned—to stick it out in the toxic wasteland of internet dating. Lucy promises true love: not just a few good dates but “a nursing home partner and a grave buddy.”
But to get there, everyone is reduced to a set of statistics and probability. Balding men under six feet tall will need to make up those deficits with higher paychecks; women over the age of 35 will need to compromise on that no balding requirement.
Lucy has embraced this marriage-as-business-proposition view, and she has her own specifications. Or really just one: exceptional wealth. When she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the brother of the groom at the wedding of one of her successful matches, she seems to have found her unicorn—an extremely wealthy man, six feet tall, solid head of hair, who is both charming and kind, with no discernible bad habits or dangerous secrets.
