Materialists
Materialists
A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) finds herself torn between the perfect match (Pedro Pascal) and her imperfect ex (Chris Evans).
kaiserjt reviewed2d ago
There really is something different about Materialists, a romantic drama (not comedy) that takes an unusually pensive view of dating as a value exchange. Through its pro matchmaker protag, we see a segment of the affluent NYC dating scene where every major element of a person is reduced to a box-check essence and served as somewhat of a probability proposition: height, weight, income, education, family history, politics. Certainly this is a thinking woman’s chick flick, but it’s even surprisingly sympathetic to men, noting that innate features such as height are so valued that even prosperous men will mutilate themselves just to get to that magic six feet (14.5% of men have this, yet most women say they want it and many require it).
Celine Song’s to be applauded for making the rare movie with content actually worth discussing, with plenty of food for thought for the male viewer even in such a female-skewed drama. So it’s a shame that she loses her way in the third act, wherein, seeking a resolution, her heroine makes a series of wildly unrealistic decisions wholly divorced from the grim reality of her character. It’s too fanciful to even be termed sweetly optimistic.
The economic factors, one of the more interesting things the movie engages, get oddly shaky, too. Lucy is said to make $80,000 a year, an aggressively paltry sum for her glam Manhattan lifestyle, while the notion that Pedro Pascal, here worth nine figures, would even need to entertain the notion of matchmaking is beyond absurd.
Still, there’s a lot here, even the aspects I don’t wholly agree with (there’s a fine difference between picky, which most of these people are, and selective, the legitimate need to find an acceptable sexual partner). A third act rewrite could have really brought this home intelligently instead of going optimistic with a shrug. But like the film’s characters ultimately learn, a life lived sagaciously can mean embracing the flawed reality in front of you, be it 68 inches tall or an absurd romantic choice.