June 12, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Celine Song
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York state, the dramatic film “Materialists” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latin people and one black person) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A workaholic matchmaker has to decide between two suitors for herself: an attentive millionaire and her financially broke ex-boyfriend.
Culture Audience: “Materialists” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, filmmaker Celine Song and predictable romantic movies.
Good performances save “Materialists” from being a trite and unrealistic version of dating in New York City. People who are black, Asian, plus-sized or ugly are rarely seen in “Materialists.” The movie delivers if you want to see a romantic fantasy. “Materialists” is the type of movie that will appeal to fans of the HBO comedy series “Sex and the City” and New York City-based romantic movies from filmmakers Nancy Meyers, Nora Ephron and Woody Allen—no matter how flawed these on-screen stories are in misrepresenting and/or excluding much of the city’s diversity. “Materialists” takes place in the 2020s, but the movie copies from the template of popular romance-oriented movies and TV shows that were made from the 1980s to 2000s.
Written and directed by Celine Song, “Materialists” is a somewhat disappointing follow-up to her excellent 2023 feature-film directorial debut “Past Lives,” a semi-autobiographical drama for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. “Past Lives” was also Oscar-nominated for Best Picture. Just like in “Past Lives,” there’s a love triangle in “Materialists” that plays out in New York City. And just like in both movies, the female protagonist has to choose between passion and practicality, as represented by the two men who are rivals for her love. Don’t assume that the outcomes of both movies are similar.
“Materialists” begins in an unspecified time period, by showing an out-of-place scene of a caveman courting a cavewoman, by bringing her flowers and by giving her ring made out of a flower. A flower ring is shown much later in “Materialists,” in what’s supposed to be a nod to the movie’s opening scene. It’s the movie’s way of saying that love and courtship go back to the origin of the human species, but this beginning scene with the cavepeople just makes this message look forced and awkward.
In “Materialists” (which takes place in the mid-2020s), protagonist Lucy Mason (played by Dakota Johnson) is an ambitious workaholic matchmaker who works at Adore Matchmaking, a dating agency for affluent people. Lucy, who is in her mid-30s, is a never-married bachelorette with no children. She’s been so busy with her job, Lucy says she doesn’t have time for a love life. In the beginning of the movie, she describes herself as “voluntary celibate.”
In other words, Lucy is good at finding love for other people, but not so good at finding love for herself. She’s also good at giving emotional support to her clients, but she treats her matchmaking like a stockbroker treats the stock market. She even describes the dating scene as a “marketplace” and people as “investments.”
Not much else is revealed about Lucy except in her own words: She grew up poor, she had a “shitty family” with divorced parents, and if she gets married, the number-one requirement is that her husband has to be filthy rich. She smokes cigarettes as if she thinks she’s in a Lauren Bacall movie. It should come as no surprise that Lucy used to be an aspiring actress, but she quit pursuing acting because she couldn’t find enough work as an actress to have the income that she wants.
This matchmaking job is the first job Lucy has had where she feels she can support herself in a middle-class lifestyle, although Lucy’s $80,000 annual salary is too low for someone who’s supposedly the star employee at this New York City matchmaking agency for affluent people. Lucy is completely estranged from her family—it’s hinted that this estrangement was her choice—but the movie gives no details about what caused Lucy to want to cut herself off from her family.
As Lucy says in the movie, being poor or financially unstable for most of her life has fueled her goal to eventually marry a rich man. When she talks about any future husband she might have, she only talks about materialistic or surface-level things that she wants him to have. Of course, in a movie like “Materialists,” you know from the way that Lucy blathers on about wealth and net worth for any potential suitors for her and her clients, you can tell deep down, Lucy just wants a good old-fashioned (stereotypical) romance for herself.
“Materialists” is partially inspired by Song’s real-life past experience as a matchmaker at a dating agency for affluent people. But if you believe everything that’s in “Materialists,” you’d have to believe that these types of dating agencies in New York City mostly have young, physically attractive women as matchmakers, the women are all slender, and they all act like sorority sisters who giggle and go from room to room in a pack. You’d also have to believe that almost all women want or should want to get married as a life goal.
Lucy is depicted as the agency’s most successful matchmaker, who is both admired and envied by her colleagues. She keeps herself at just enough of an emotional distance not to have any close friends in her co-worker group. Lucy’s boss Violet (played by Marin Ireland) only cares about Lucy in terms of Lucy’s ability to make money for the company.
You’d also have to believe that clients of elite matchmaker agencies in New York City are all in their 20s, 30s or 40s, and they set shallow and often-unrealistic goals for what they want in a potential lover or spouse. Several montages in “Materialists” show very irritating conversations where clients list their demands and requirements, as if they’re ordering items off of a menu or looking to fill a job position. A big part of Lucy’s job is to not give harsh criticism to her clients but also manage her clients’ expectations.
What all the male clients have in common is that they only want women who are thin, pretty and in their 20s. What the female clients have in common is they want men who are tall, good-looking and rich. (The only exception is a black lesbian/queer woman, who’s in the movie for less than a minute in a very token role.) As it stands, “Materialists” makes almost all of the workers and clients in the New York City matchmaking business look like vain caricatures who are too self-absorbed to notice their hollow personalities.
“Materialists” isn’t a comedy, so none of these extreme stereotypes can really be counted as satire. Some of it is uncomfortable to watch, like you’re watching filmmakers say they despise what “Sex and the City” represents and they want to make something more “elevated,” but they secretly want to live like the characters in “Sex and the City.” There is so much “Sex and the City” influence in “Materialists,” the writers of “Sex and the City” deserve a thank you credit in “Materialists.”
Lucy often has to listen with sympathetic patience when her clients are whiny, rude or neurotic. She gives advice, but it’s always advice with an agenda: Lucy doesn’t want the client to do anything that will make Lucy look like a bad matchmaker. Because so much of Lucy’s life revolves around her job, her self-esteem is very tied up in her reputation as a matchmaker.
There’s a wedding scene where the bride is a matchmaker client named Charlotte (played by Louisa Jacobson), who has a crying meltdown in a private room because she’s having doubts about getting married just minutes before the ceremony is about to start. Lucy says all the right things to make Charlotte secure enough with the decision to have the wedding as planned. Coincidence or not, the “Sex and the City” bachelorette character who was the most desperate and most insecure about getting married is also named Charlotte.
At the wedding reception, Lucy meets the groom’s bachelor brother Harry Castillo (played by Pedro Pascal), a multimillionaire financier who’s about 15 years older than Lucy. Harry introduces himself to Lucy and “checks all the boxes” of what Lucy and many of her female clients want in a potential husband: He’s good-looking, tall, rich, polite, intelligent, attentive and very romantic. Harry also comes from a close-knit and loving family. Harry works for his mother’s financial company, although that situation might be a turnoff to some potential romantic partners who think that this mother/son business relationship is too close for comfort.
Predictably, Harry is immediately smitten with Lucy and starts flirting with her when they’re at the same table. And just look who happens to be their table server at the wedding: Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (played by Chris Evans), who works for the catering company that was hired for the wedding. John is also single, available, and has no children. Being a catering employee is just a way for John to pay his bills. What John really wants to do with his life is be a professional actor. He hasn’t had much luck and is still struggling to find steady work as an actor.
In the meantime, 37-year-old John is financially broke, he lives in a cramped apartment with two roommates whom he doesn’t like very much, and he’s still not over his breakup from Lucy, who dumped him several years ago because she got tired of John not being able to afford to give her what she wants. When John and Lucy see each other at this wedding, there’s still tension between them. It’s the type of tension that signals unresolved feelings for each other. You know where all of this is going, of course.
“Materialists” has scenes that sometimes overflow with pretentious dialogue, but other scenes have genuine zest, are touching, or ring true. The movie looks glamorous, but the romantic scenes needed more sizzle. In “Materialists,” people talk about love more than they show love. A minimal amount of information is given about Lucy’s personal background, but even less is told about John, who doesn’t have any close friends or family members in his life for emotional support. It’s briefly mentioned that John—just like Lucy—comes from a working-class family with divorced parents.
An “unlucky in love” client of Lucy’s named Sophie (played by Zoë Winters) has a subplot in “Materialists” that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking, but this subplot is sometimes clumsily handled in the movie, even though Winters gives a standout performance. It’s mentioned more than once that Lucy considers Sophie to be a special client because Lucy feels more emotionally invested in Sophie than Lucy feels for most of Lucy’s other clients. But the movie keeps it vague on what this emotional attachment really means for Lucy, who has no friends outside of her job.
Johnson portrays Lucy as someone who is a mess of contradictions: Lucy is soft-spoken, but her attitude is often hard and cynical. She’s sometimes arrogant but sometimes self-loathing. Lucy frequently tells people that she’s an uncompromising gold digger but her romantic interest in John says otherwise. And it’s pretty sad that Lucy thinks she’s too old for Harry because she thinks all rich heterosexual bachelors over the age of 40 only want girlfriends in their 20s. An experienced matchmaker in real life would know that stereotype isn’t always true.
Whether or not you’re fully rooting for Lucy when watching “Materialists” will depend on how much you like Johnson’s performance. Lucy is supposed to be a jaded social climber, but Johnson plays Lucy as a little too calm and mellow for someone with Lucy’s burning ambitions. One of the movie’s biggest shortcomings is that not enough is told or shown about Lucy’s other past relationships to give a better picture of who she really is as a romantic partner and what patterns or habits she seems to have when it comes to choosing a romantic partner.
“Materialists” has a few flashbacks to what Lucy and John were like when they were a couple. They frequently argued over money. If you have enough life experience or know anything about couples’ psychology, these flashbacks won’t make you feel good about the chances of Lucy and John staying together if they reunite and start dating each other again.
John still has the same financial issues and still feels “stuck” in his life, which is why Lucy broke up with him in the first place. John says to Lucy that he sees himself having kids who look like Lucy, but “Materialists” never reveals if Lucy wants to have kids. It’s an example of a few disconnects that don’t make “Materialists” entirely convincing that Lucy and John could be “soul mates” who are right for each other.
Evans has played this type of sarcastic underachiever many times before in other movies about romance where the female main character is supposed to fall for his character’s rouge-ish charm. And there’s nothing wrong with Evans’ performance, but he’s not doing anything that’s truly unique or special in this movie. Pascal doesn’t have much to work with for the Harry character, who’s supposed to be the “perfect catch” for many bachelorettes. Harry’s only noticeable flaw is that Harry tells little lies about himself to impress Lucy.
“Materialists” is a mixed bag of a film. It’s escapist and fluffy entertainment pretending to be an insightful and clever look at 2020s romance. The truth is that “Materialists” isn’t complex or innovative because it follows the same formulas of other love triangle movies that are told from the perspective of a female protagonist. You know exactly what the end result will be, but the journey getting there in “Materialists” is uneven because it’s sometimes enjoyable and sometimes annoying.
