Materialists (2025) ****

 

Writer/director Celine Song's second film is no sophomore slump. Her first film, 2023's “Past Lives” was a beautiful story about a woman whose past comes back to remind her what she lost when her family emigrated from Korea. It's a well-crafted film, and Song gets wonderful performances from her cast. Her follow-up, “Materialists,” shows that that was no fluke.

The film starts with the thesis that marriage is a business contract, nothing more. We evaluate potential mates based on their score on attractiveness, wealth, upbringing, education, and so forth. A good match is someone for whom the “math” matches up well with our own.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is an expert at doing “the math.” She works as a matchmaker for an elite Manhattan dating service. From that vantage, she gets to see, up close, what people really think about when dating. People tell her things they would never tell their therapist, their clergy, or their best friend. All the women unashamedly have a height requirement, and the men are no more embarrassed at demanding women 20 years their junior. A 48-year-old guy explains that 21-year-olds seem a little immature, so he wants a 27-year-old. “Not in their 30s, and 29 is probably pushing it.” One woman requests that they start their search with white men only, and then, if they aren't having any luck, they can widen the search to include other races. On some level, you have to admire Lucy's clients' honesty, even if they don't have the good grace to be embarrassed at their entitled, shallow dating demands.

Seeing on a daily basis the naked, transactional truth about people's desires has killed any sense of romance in Lucy. For her own dating desires, her only must-have is that a man be rich, and her nice-to-have is that he be “really, disgustingly rich.” At the wedding of a client, a triumph for Lucy, she meets the handsome, rich Harry (Pedro Pascal) and also runs into an old flame, John (Chris Evans). As things progress with both of them, Lucy discovers that she has a heart after all, and that she will have to choose between it and her head.

We don't get many films that peer, with such perceptive empathy, at the human condition. It would be easy to sit in judgment of Lucy's clients and their check-boxes, but, you know, the heart wants what it wants. When these people tick off the things they think they must have in a mate, they are being more truly honest with Lucy than they probably are with anyone else. Maybe it's good that they are getting those thoughts out, instead of hiding them, maybe even from themselves. The mistake Lucy and her clients make, though, is thinking that these checklists represent the true core of their desires. Lucy thinks that romance can be boiled down to a completely rational choice, based on “math,” but she learns that the heart keeps secrets even from itself.

4 stars out of 5