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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MATERIALISTS TRIES TO UPDATE THE ROM-COM FOR THE TINDER GENERATION  
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Eileen Jones
June 18, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Writer-director Celine Song’s Materialists follows a professional
NYC matchmaker split between two charming suitors. It’s yet another
attempt to update the Jane Austen formula, but without the poignancy
and beauty of Song’s acclaimed Past Lives. _

Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal star in Materialists. , (A24 / TNS)

 

Celine Song, writer-director of the thoughtful, poignant, highly
praised, Best Picture–nominated drama _Past Lives_ (2023), has
come out with her second film, a romantic comedy
called _Materialists._ Song’s trying to be thoughtful about that
too — the way the silly, swoony genre as a whole works, as well as
the way the real-life perils of contemporary romance play out. But how
to get the swoony and the cruelly crass together in one film?

It can be done, as Song knows when she repeatedly cites Jane Austen in
interviews. Austen’s novels continue to inspire successful film
adaptations due to her wizardry in mining believable romantic matches
out of the unpromising materials of men and women trapped in confining
social roles dictated by harsh factors such as age, appearance,
income, and class status. Song is consciously following in the firm
footsteps of Austen, who especially foregrounded the role money plays
in love and marriage, most famously in the ironic opening line
of _Pride and Prejudice_: “It is a truth universally acknowledged
that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a
wife.”

And Song has done her research when it comes to the cold calculations
involved in matchmaking companies such as the one at the center
of _Materialists._ It seems Song worked
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a matchmaker in the 2010s and “learned more about people in those
six months than at any other time in my life.”

Out of that bruising experience, she created the narrative following
the love life of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a leading rep at the New York
City–based matchmaking company Adore. Lucy is a smooth cynic when it
comes to “doing the math” — rating prospective “matches” in
hard-edged calculations of age, height, weight, fitness, profession,
educational level, conventional notions of physical attractiveness,
and above all, income.

The greedy, calculating demands of Lucy’s clients are driven by
their elaborate fantasies of what they think they “deserve,” which
are presumably influenced by the movies. Everyone’s seeking dream
dates and regards themselves as entitled to perfect love, no matter
how manifestly imperfect they are themselves.

But then Lucy herself meets a “unicorn,” Harry Castillo (Pedro
Pascal), a man who’s tall, handsome, and rich, a perfect ten in
terms of the “math.” He inspires Lucy to reenter the dating game
herself, regarding Harry with the frank objective of marrying him for
his money. She finds Harry’s opulent Manhattan apartment so
desirable it first distracts from — and then ignites — her first
sexual encounter with him.

Though as a professional, she feels compelled to warn Harry, in a
businesslike, honest-broker way, that he could do better. She’s in
her thirties, and younger women in their twenties are valued much
higher. Plus she makes a mere $80,000 per year, chicken feed in NYC,
which means she’s carrying a lot of debt. But Harry assures her she
has “intangible” value that makes up for these deficits. She’s
reached the status of a “luxury good.” Such a romantic!

It seems like a perfect match. But the trouble is, Lucy’s still
drawn to her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), an aspiring actor
working catering jobs who’s perpetually poor and still living with
obnoxious roommates in a horribly run-down but rent-controlled
apartment. He’s also still driving the same beater car with the
whining engine and “the same smell” she remembers with both
affection and trepidation after having leaped from that car years
before, publicly breaking up with him because, she shouts, “You’re
always broke!”

But John still loves her as helplessly as ever, and she’s called him
in the past whenever she really needed a confidante. She phones him
immediately when something terrible happens at work. One of the
clients she’s working hardest for is Sophie (Zoe Winters), a mature
professional who is also “a nice girl” being harshly rejected by
her dates. “She’s fat and forty,” says one appalling git after a
date with Sophie. “I’d never swipe right on a woman like that.”

Then — SPOILER, I suppose — Sophie is assaulted by a “match”
Lucy made for her. It’s a grimly common risk of dating through
matchmaking companies — or any other way.

The way _Materialists_ moves abruptly into drama later in the story
is a common trait of the romantic comedy genre, which differs from
wildly irreverent screwball comedy by tending to seek, ultimately, a
solemn validation of conventional notions of heterosexual love.
However, romantic comedies don’t ever plunge into as dark an abyss
as _Materialists_ does.

It should be noted that _Materialists_ in general isn’t delivering
a lot of laughs. It’s not exactly chuckle-worthy, for example, when
we see the montages of people seeking matches who list their ever-more
unrealistic and appalling criteria for dates. As Lucy finally
acknowledges, it’s impossible to ethically cooperate with such
despicable demands as “no black people, no fatties.”

Yet grating against such realistic horrors in _Materialists_ are the
distracting fantasy elements required for romantic comedies. For
example, the standard torn-between-two-lovers plot pivots on Dakota
Johnson, who looks like a fashion model. She’s so tall and svelte
and perfectly planed, she might’ve convincingly played a
“fembot” in the old _Austin Powers _movies. The daughter of Don
Johnson and Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hedren,
Dakota Johnson is a glossy product of Hollywood entertainment-industry
breeding. To see her deciding between the overwhelmingly attractive
and sympathetic Pedro Pascal and the absurdly handsome former Captain
America Chris Evans is to be presented with one of those glamorous
Hollywood problems one can only dream of having.

It makes you recall that one of the great strengths of Song’s _Past
Lives_ is recognizing how attractive people can be who are
recognizably “ordinary.” That is, they could pass you on the
street without causing your neck to snap just trying to get a second
look at them.

In other ways,_ Materialists_ really tests the limits of how much
grim 2020s reality a movie can reflect while still functioning in the
fantasy realm of romantic comedy. Though if you’re going to take on
current Western world realities, why not address the vaster spread of
love’s possibilities? Also note that the title might mislead you
into thinking this movie is going to do something savvier about bleak
material conditions — like how is Lucy living so nicely and dressing
so fabulously in NYC on $80,000 a year? Even indebtedness can’t
quite account for it. But _Materialists_ (once again, despite the
promising title) treads very lightly on this subject.

The film really functions more as an erratic meta-commentary on the
rom-com genre, which is a warning to those who might be thinking
they’re going to see some old-fashioned lark such as the ones that
used to pair a Sandra Bullock with a Hugh Grant. Though to hear Celine
Song tell it, she’s really channeling some of her romantic comedy
faves, such as Nora Ephron’s Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan
vehicles _Sleepless in Seattle_ and _You’ve Got
Mail._ Personally, I hate Nora Ephron movies, which did so much to
help ruin the legacy of the classic romantic comedy genre. What she
did to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant _The Shop Around the
Corner_ (1940), for example, in order to create the
idiotic _You’ve Got Mail_ should be considered a criminal offense.

There’s just something wrongheaded and wrong-hearted about the
whole _Materialists _project. I especially hated the prelude
featuring a prehistoric couple tenderly courting in front of their
cave dwellings. It’s irrational perhaps, but I felt somehow outraged
on behalf of the cave dwellers being held up for sappy idealizing,
these noble savages enacting “natural” love for us jaded modern
types.

Needless to say, we can’t go back to the cave. But we don’t have
to be complete assholes about human relationships either. Surely
that’s plain, without trying to blame Tinder or Bumble or eHarmony
for our coldhearted callousness. People sucked at dating before there
were any apps or matchmaking services to aid us in acting like creeps.
That they facilitate our rottenness is the most you can say, but it
hardly seems worth saying in these weirdly narrow, old-fashioned, and
falsely glamorized terms.

This isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that someone
tries to work the Jane Austen magic and finds it’s a lot tougher
than they figured.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

 

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