I went into the new film Materialists knowing basically nothing — just that it was written and directed by Celine Song, who made 2023’s glorious Past Lives, and Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Pine were in it. Based on the movie poster, I assumed it might be a catty Whit Stillman-style satire or comedy of manners about horrible people in New York.

I was not wrong (sort of). Based on the first act, it definitely fits the pattern of a story about how extremely cynical New Yorkers compete over status markers, job titles, body shapes, and other mundane horrors. If Materialists had stuck with this theme, it might have been a more entertaining, albeit emptier and thinner film, but Song is hunting for bigger prey. The movie is triangulated somewhere in the vicinity between Reality Bites and Pretty Woman and Metropolitan and Challengers. (What a combination, right?)

Materialists is about Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who has the ultimate care-work job — sommelier for annoying people with too much money and too few social skills — which is to say, a professional matchmaker. She scoops up clients who want a man who is 6’4″, makes over $200,000 a year, has a full head of hair, and an athletic build — under 45. Or who want a woman is skinny, under 28, makes $200,000 a year, has an Ivy League degree, and is blonde or brunette or whatever.

This is the story of a perfectionist in pursuit of failure — basically nearly every over-educated New Yorker’s experience of dating.

As the leftist magazine n+1 ingeniously put it way back in 2005:

Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it’s an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner. Keep Looking, says dating. You’re Not Done Yet. What About That One? And That One? Dating, like the tyrant, seeks perfection (within a certain price range). Whereas the heart, like the eye, can only cling to imperfections: her funny stride, and the way her voice breaks, child-like, on the phone. And so the dater, self-baffling, seeks what the heart cannot understand…

We must stop dating. But we can’t. Because the only way to stop dating would be to date more, and more efficiently, to become more adept at spotting, on the first date, those things that on the fifth or fifteenth date are going to become a problem. Of course that only makes it worse—by that standard, even Abelard and Heloise wouldn’t have made it. The other option is to change yourself. But you’d have done that by now, if you could.
 

n+1 in 2005 was able to spot this self-defeating and noxious dynamic even before online dating became a universal norm. The heart seeks the imperfect, but the mind seeks the absolute — as Lucy says over and over in Materialists, “the math.” Marriage, she does not say wrongly, has always been a business proposition and a transaction — though it’s very funny to hear Manhattanites grouse over cows and dowries in 2025. It is, though. Any sensible person knows that literally wedding themselves to another person means taking on their income, their debts, their attitudes about money and saving, what they prioritize and imagine for the future.

This should not be news. But of course, Lucy’s matchmaking business freebases this commonsense cocaine into the crack of a professional service: reducing everything about flirtation and sex and romance down to a statistical calculation. You’re a little bit too hot for him. You’re a little bit too balding for her; if you were four years younger, we might have a deal.

The idea of “deals” (particularly funny in Trump’s America) runs through the film, from the very beginning to the very end, which culminates in a handshake. Even after the rise of marriage as a love-pairing (a fairly modern notion), many people still discern that marital life is an economic proposition on some level. We paper over it, consciously or unconsciously, but whether someone has a lot of debt or a lot of earning power probably (and probably should) come across the radar in considering a legal partnership, or even, dare we say, love.

Or maybe it should not. Materialists has a very 1940s-screwball comedy or romcom feel to it, where a know-it-all city girl, through heartache and chaos, learns a lesson. Not to spoil anything, but it suffices to say that she has to choose between the debonair, impossibly attractive, and rich Pedro Pascal, and another guy. It could be The Phi\ladelphia Story, or it could be Reality Bites, or it could be The Rules of the Game or Jerry Maguire. Writer-director Celine Song keeps viewers on their feet well enough throughout, giving each of the three principal characters their own story arcs that make them feel real and believable.

But in the end, the basic question remains — one that hero Lucy didn’t even consider to be a question in the beginning. Maybe marriage is a business deal or transaction, but is love anywhere on the table in this negotiation? Would any rational person not optimize for maximum return? As depressing as it might be for anyone who has ever swiped left or right, or spent weeks chatting with an unknown person to end up empty-handed and frustrated at the end will understand, this is all a series of calculations and trade-offs. But then hopefully, one fine day, it isn’t.