REVIEW: Materialists

In seminal romantic comedies or dramas, the mark of great writing was in artfully burying the lovebirds' insecurities and hangups in artifice. Pretense. The lovebirds didn't know how to honestly approach their own feelings at first. The distortion revealed the personality of both the situation and the relationship. What's more, it was just fun. The film would slowly thaw this facade until Cary Grant and Irene Dunne finally had, what Materialists calls, the ugliest parts of themselves laid bare for one another. Only then were they ready to embrace.

Yet with Materialists, out this weekend, even in moments when the situation calls for vulnerability, the characters are oddly empirical and clinical with describing the things about them that they are ashamed of. These players might as well be performing a passionate reading of a Walmart receipt. Yes, Materialists is very obviously about the transactionality of the dating scene, but the movie finds itself becoming a victim of that very kind of sterility. What we have here is a drama-less love triangle with Dakota Johnson caught between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.

The movie is most easily described as a sort of gender-bent Hitch. In this film, "Hitch" is Lucy, a matchmaker in her mid-thirties who finds herself teased by the possibility of finding the same kind of love she facilitates for others--basically the same tension as Hitch.

But Hitch gave itself a highly comedic bend that opened up a lot of doors for the kind of absurdity needed to get these dummies to lower their defenses and admit they loved each other, and this movie doesn't seem interested in drinking from that well. Moreover, Hitch knew exactly what tools it would need to prove its own thesis. The characters and their relationships to courtship and vulnerability revealed the avenues by which a person learns to discover how to love authentically. Meanwhile, there's no synergy between the game pieces Materialists sets for itself.

Lucy and John (Evans) had a relationship some time before the events of the film, but that relationship deteriorated when she figured out she couldn't love him because he was always broke. (We know this because she tells us specifically, repeatedly, "I couldn't love you because you were always broke.") It's only after Lucy puts herself back on the market that John drifts back into her life. (And hey, if Chris Evans has a chance, maybe the rest of us do too ...)

Lucy's character flaw might have been perfectly home in a Clueless analogue, but the film tries to play this totally straight ... and all without probing why a person might actually prefer wealth over companionship. Neither does it do much to expose the materialism of the world at large. There is no kinetic energy to this ritual.

It's not like the wealthy Harry (Pascal) doesn't prove himself a suitable emotional support for Lucy. He's a perfectly articulate, sensitive gentleman, made more endearing by Pascal playing him at just the right volume. And so Lucy's time with him ends up exposing nothing about the cost of making wealth the center of one's romantic ambitions. Neither of the romantic outlets for our protagonist have any muscle to them.

This has the scent of a movie that wants to be subversive, but it doesn't double-check its own math, and by the end of this trip around the merry-go-round, you don't feel like you or the characters have really learned anything. And maybe it thinks it's one of those movies where the bulk of the story can be carried on the interplay between the cast--and it's not a bad cast--but even Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard were allowed a good rainstorm to really bring them together.

--The Professor

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