Materialists Puts the Class Back in Romance

And the longing in value optimization

Romance films and novels in our current moment tend to either ignore class differences or eroticize them. The billionaire romance subgenre and all its variants (like Pretty Woman or Fifty Shades of Grey) attach financial independence, and/or luxury, to the happiness ever after. Superficially more realistic egalitarian romcoms like When Harry Met Sally or The Lovebirds mostly just elide the crunching of money and income altogether, assuming that all participants in the courtship have access to a middle or upper middle-class standard of living via means that require no explicit investigation.

Celine Song’s second feature, The Materialists, is unusual in that the economics of marriage are obsessively front and center throughout. Actress turned matchmaker Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) works to bring compatible singles together—which means aligning value propositions including looks, health, age, degree of baldness, and, especially, income. She’s excellent at her job in part because she tells people, with absolute conviction, that their desire to be valued, no matter how shallowly expressed (like the bride who wants to marry her fiancé because it will be a victory over her sister), is valid and normal. In that vein, she herself broke up with her perpetually impoverished theater dude boyfriend John (Chris Evans) and is now dating charming all-but-billionaire finance bro Henry (Pedro Pascal.)

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Dakota Johnson is not an especially responsive actress, and in Song’s sumptuous, static compositions she tends to turn into a tasteful set dressing—as in a stunning image in Henry’s apartment where she sits talking on her phone against an enormous wall of shelves and tsotschkes, as if she’s already one of his possessions.

The stylization and emotional distance is I think why there’s been a certain amount of skepticism among critics; one referred to the movie, as a kind of romcom “chemistry test;” another dings the film for too “weighty aspirations.” These are two different ways of saying the same thing; romcoms generally feel light, quick, cheerful. Materialists doesn’t. There are certainly laugh lines, but it’s more a drama than a comedy, and the search for love is more desperate than fun—not least when the movie acknowledges that the dangers of dating include, not just humiliation and a bad match, but sexual assault.

The film, in short, is a half-step removed from the genre it appears to inhabit, which makes it feel unfulfilling and even alienated from itself. This is, though, I think both intentional and thematic. Lucy, Henry, and John all struggle, to one degree or another, with the fact that they want to be in one of those effervescent romcoms and despite themselves keep getting dragged back into a world in which money and shallow material considerations matter a lot more than they’re supposed to.

One of the most affecting scenes in the film occurs when both Henry and Lucy admit to each other that they’ve had plastic surgery—about the closest I’ve seen in a Hollywood romance to an acknowledgement that the people on screen are constructed to be impossible objects of desire. In another painful and revealing flashback soliloquy, Lucy tells John that she does not want to hate him for having no money for a date on their anniversary. But she does, and as a result she also, eloquently and miserably, hates herself.

These grimy admissions of pettiness, shallowness and cruelty are not the stuff of which romcoms are supposed to be made. But that’s exactly what gives the film an edge of realy misery that romcoms, or Hollywood films in general, very rarely even try for, much less achieve.

That’s not to say that the film is an exercise in gritty realism. Song talks about value propositions and says that marriage is a business deal, but she never mentions housework or how sexism affects women’s careers. Nor is Materialists a bleak Kafkaesque dark night of the soul like Bridesmaids. But there’s a parallel in the way that Lucy and Henry and to some extent John all are diminished rather than empowered by their wants and their hopes. The movie asks you to care about them for real failures and real flaws, which makes Song’s belief in love more, rather than less, sweeping.

It’s easy to let the billionaire solve everything or to pretend there’s nothing to solve. But Song believes you can’t convincingly reject materialism if you aren’t willing to contemplate, at least briefly, the ways in which poverty can ruin everything.