Where are Lucy's friends in Materialists?
A spoiler-ridden review of what could have been.
In many ways, Materialists was a promising premise: a romantic drama starring Dakota Johnson as a professional match maker for wealthy singles, Pedro Pascal as a prospective client-turned-love-interest and Chris Evans as her broke artist ex, in a story that interrogates the perception of marriage as first and foremost an economic proposition; a business deal. Directed by Celine Song who gave us Past Lives — possibly one of the best films I have ever seen, and certainly the best romantic drama — this was meant to be a life-changing watch. Unfortunately, it does not deliver.
Lucy (Johnson) is 35, earns 80k a year before tax, and is excelling in her career with professional matchmaking company Adore. While attending the ninth wedding she is responsible for, she meets Harry (Pascal), a “unicorn” who against all odds is more interested in dating Lucy than any of her clients, and John (Evans), her ex boyfriend who happens to be working as an employee of the wedding’s caterer. And so, a love triangle ensues.
WARNING: spoilers ahead.
Materialists has moments of poignancy and reflection that show Song’s touch — the flashback to the breakup between Lucy and John, Lucy’s meltdown at a wedding the pair crash, the conversation in which she course-corrects a near-runaway bride — but it’s surprising to me how little it explores the saddest and most haunting theme of the film: projection, and the way we ruin our own lives by doing it.
Self-loathing, projection and self-sabotage
The most compelling part of Materialists for me was not Lucy’s relationship with Harry or John, but her relationship with herself — which, as we come to discover, is steeped in self-loathing.
In a scene early in the film, we are shown a flashback of Lucy and John’s breakup. The pair are trying to make it to the dinner reservation for their five-year-anniversary, but John is refusing to park the car because all the meters are too expensive. Lucy is near tears as she argues with John that if he doesn’t park the car they’ll miss their reservation — which will result in a $50 fee if they cancel. This sparks even more anger from John and ends with Lucy getting out the car and crying that she hates John because he’s broke, accuses John of hating her (which he says he doesn’t), but says that it doesn’t matter because he can’t ever hate her more than she hates herself for feeling these things and being this way.
It’s the kind of fight that’s embarrassing to watch, but its ugliness is familiar. We’ve all been there at some stage, centring our anger and depression and self-loathing in a fight that isn’t really about us at all.
When I watched this scene, I assumed it foreshadowed a later reckoning with this self-loathing, which to me was clearly at the centre of Lucy’s behaviour. It manifests when she feels insecure in her competence at work despite outperforming her peers, when she tries to sabotage Harry’s (Pedro Pascal) interest in her because she feels she doesn’t deserve him (something she states again and again during their dates), and also when she keeps calling her loser ex (surely the most self-loathing thing you can do).
This reaches a culmination when Lucy, after having given in to Harry’s relentless bid to convince her that he does actually like her, realises he plans to propose. It’s a moment where she is at a crossroads: she can choose to have this life with a perfect man who will take care of her financially and be a worthy companion, or she can ruin it. And she ruins it.
Lucy tells Harry that she doesn’t love him. Sure — subtext in this film suggests so when she calls John in an emergency instead of Harry — but then she tells Harry that he doesn’t love her either, despite the sequence of events we’ve just seen, in which he has broken through her walls, astutely learned all of her best qualities and then insisted she hear them, convinced her of her value, and even expressed that he believes that she is not only his equal, but knows more than him — a massive deal considering how much she insists her own inferiority. The cherry on top is that he tells her explicitly that he wants to learn from and grow with her — which, to me, is love.
When Lucy told Harry he doesn’t really love her, it felt like a parallel to the flashback in which she told John he hates her. I expected this to be the moment the film challenged her projection of her self-loathing onto others. I expected Harry to deny her this argument the way John failed to. I expected the film to say “just because you can’t love yourself, doesn’t mean someone else can’t love you.” I expected it to finally address the elephant in the room — that Lucy is not the perfect judge of relationships that she thinks she is because she can’t see past her own blind spot: her fear of rejection and loneliness. She can’t let a good thing happen to her, because she doesn’t feel like she deserves it.
Instead, Harry drops the bomb that he isn’t sure he is capable of love — that he simply can’t feel it, despite the sequence of events we’ve just seen in which he has connected and sparred with Lucy in a way that no one has before.
Sorry, what?
I think whether or not you were rooting for Harry in this love triangle, this feels like an awfully convenient (and rather cheap) way to dispose of his character and push Lucy back into John’s arms. After all, the only way John would ever be a viable option to us as the audience — who have seen him in his rageful fits and noticed his contempt towards Lucy and her job — is if he’s the only option. Which it seems he is, because Lucy finds herself with nowhere to stay after the breakup, and so she asks if she can stay with John (who, by the way, lives in a share house with at least two other people at the age of 37).
It’s at this point that I simply had to ask: where are Lucy’s friends?
Where are the women in her life who she can confide in, who can tell her not to give in to her fears, the same way she consoled the bride earlier in the movie? That moment was my favourite in the whole film: reframing wanting to marry a man because he makes your sister jealous as wanting to marry a man because he makes you feel valuable was not just comedy genius — it was a rejection of the idea that love is pure and unselfish. Wanting someone who makes you a better person, who makes people envy you because they are perfect and in choosing you they make you feel perfect too, is not actually ugly. It’s normal. We love people for all kinds of insane reasons, but we still love them. And loving someone is just as much about how they make you feel as it is about how you feel about them.
This is what I desperately wanted Lucy to hear from a friend, but she never confides in any.
At no point throughout the film do we see Lucy actually have friends or confidants. Her only interactions with other women are her colleagues (who she doesn’t appear to hang out with outside of work) and her client Sophie (who she is friends with but in a you’re-my-favourite-client kind of way). It’s worth noting here that there is a harrowing B-plot around Sophie that results in Lucy re-evaluating what kind of friend she is, and what her responsibility is to the women in her life. The film understands that an integral part of being friends with someone is protecting them from risk, which is ironic because it doesn’t give Lucy a friend to do this for her.
Why is there no one she can talk to about whether or not she should go back to her struggling ex (I think we all know what a girl friend would say to this!), and why is her ex the only person she can stay with once she breaks up with Harry?
In fact, this broke ex/struggle relationship propaganda feels distinctly lacking in a platonic friend perspective — because I can guarantee you few friends would encourage you to partake in one.
Risk, marriage as an economic prospect and struggle relationships
A theme repeatedly woven into the fabric of Materialists is that of the risk that comes with dating and partnership.
At first we think of this risk as an economic one, like any risk you take when you make a large investment. However, it soon morphs into physical risk (the risk to your safety when you meet a stranger) and then becomes an emotional risk (the risk that you will love someone, and things will not work out).
Risks must be weighed at all times in order to decide if an investment is worthy. With John, the risk is high — he is still broke, still struggling, still angry, and still very much the man he was when Lucy left him. He has not shown any signs of change, and the film explicitly states as much. However, they were once in a relationship and so we know he’s capable of loving Lucy and probably still loves her too — so Lucy must weigh the risk of disappointment and failure with the security of knowing your partner is in love with you.
With Harry’s character, the risk is non-existent — he is wealthy, stable, kind, thoughtful, attractive, generous. He would make a good husband/investment in every way — a “unicorn”, as they call him. The only issue to consider, if there is one, is that there’s no guarantee marrying him would result in the passionate, all-consuming, fairy tale love that most people yearn for. Lucy must decide if having her needs met is worth the risk of never finding that passion.
At least, this is the version of events the film presents us with, concluding its thesis that real love is not only worth the risk, but comes with it by pairing off Lucy with John. Love is never without risk — which is true, and I agree. However, I’m surprised the film framed risk in this way because from my perspective John was the safe bet and Harry was the risk Lucy should have taken.
By going back to John, Lucy might have rejected security, but she still settled for safety. While she chose a man who would not be able to live the lifestyle she craved, a man who is prone to angry outbursts, she did so for the knowledge that he will always love her even though she hates herself. She chooses a doomed relationship (or at the very least, an unsatisfying one) for the safety of the knowledge that her partner thinks he is punching up. He is the safe option because he is the familiar one — she already knows how this dynamic works.
In my mind, choosing Harry would have been the real risk — he was new, unknown, unexplored, but promising. She had no way of predicting what their relationship would transpire to — a good thing, I think, given she is obsessed with “doing the maths” — and the two were intellectual equals. Harry was able to astutely express all the things he liked (and could potentially love) about her, none of which were related to her looks or finances. He broke through Lucy’s own (greatly flawed and mostly uninterrogated) perception of her self and saw her for who she is — an intimacy that John fails because when Lucy, feeling revolted by her self, asks how he can possibly love her, he can’t list explain that she is loveable or refute her self-flagellation. He can only say he loves her , and that’s it… which is meant to be romantic, but to me, feels uninspired. This is a woman he was in a relationship with for five years and never stopped loving, who he is drawn to against all odds and can’t get over, and he can’t name a single thing about her that he loves? And I’m supposed to be happy about this?
When the two get back together, Lucy assures John that their relationship will work this time because she can take care of herself. John says he’ll pick up more shifts with the caterer. He proposes to Lucy with a ring made out of a flower he picked out of a cheap bouquet he bought, and they have a court wedding in a room full of other couples.
The film’s thesis is that love shouldn’t have economic barriers or be determined by class, but it’s interesting that Lucy and John couldn’t simply remain in a relationship until they felt their finances were sorted out enough to share them — the film ended with them getting married despite Lucy’s self-sufficiency. So perhaps its thesis is that marriage shouldn’t have economic barriers. But what does a union mean when you remain independent from each other in the material sense?
It’s also worth noting that despite its thesis, the only thing the film deems important enough to show us about its characters is their class — which it doesn’t even really do a good job of, considering John lives on a bougie street and Lucy is more chic than any of her rich clients. We don’t learn about any of the trio’s music taste, hobbies, the books they read or who their friends are. We only learn that they can either provide financially or can’t — which is exactly what we are supposed to be critiquing?
The film also pokes fun at ridiculous, sexist and racist dating standards, including women who have preferences for dating white men before they consider other races. Obviously this is good, but the commentary falls flat given Lucy ultimately only develops feelings for the white, flawed man over the ethnic, perfect one. (Side note, but I feel like this movie may have been more effective if Pedro and Chris swapped roles… Pedro as the earnest, marginalised actor and Chris as an emotionally removed rich guy makes a lot more sense from a likability POV.)
I wanted to love Materialists so much — and I did enjoy watching it — but again and again it refutes its own story, forgets its own thesis and fails to make us believe in its central romance.
As someone who married a man when he was a 24-year-old undergrad student who worked a casual retail job and still lived at home, I’m not a materialist. I married for love. I am a romantic, despite what this essay might suggest.
But if Materialists can’t even convince me, who genuinely wants to root for the broke boy with a passion, of its struggle romance, then there’s a problem. In this case, it was the film’s failure to fully address Lucy’s self-loathing.
Lucy needed some female friends to tell her the truth of her situation because, unfortunately, we couldn’t.
THANK YOU. One of the many problems I had with that movie - why did none of them have any fucking pals?