The Materialists: A Clinical Dissection of Modern Love, Class, and the Neo-Feminist Dilemma in Celine Song's New York

 

Materialists, the sophomore feature film from writer and director Celine Song, following her Academy Award-nominated debut Past Lives, is a mesmerizing and intellectually sharp drama that masterfully subverts the romantic comedy genre. Set against the relentlessly competitive and opulent backdrop of modern-day New York City, the film meticulously dissects the complex intersection of love, financial security, and personal value in a world heavily colonized by capitalist metrics. This is not a simple tale of choosing the "right" man; it is a profound philosophical inquiry into the nature of human connection when everything, including the heart, has a price tag.

The narrative anchor is Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), a successful, high-end matchmaker for the city’s elite at a firm named Adore. Lucy embodies a calculated, almost cynical pragmatism towards romance, which she views less as a magical occurrence and more as a highly predictable, mutually beneficial merger. Her professional success is built on a materialistic philosophy: she believes she can scientifically calculate a couple’s long-term compatibility by ticking off a checklist of attributes wealth, career status, height, age, and even physical appearance all of which serve as proxies for a person's market value. Her personal life strictly adheres to this doctrine; she has sworn off dating anyone who cannot offer significant financial security, famously stating that she would rather die alone than marry someone poor. Her success as a matchmaker, which she boasts has led to nine marriages, validates her belief that the rational, financial choice is the superior one, even as she witnesses the emotional compromises and hidden anxieties that plague her clients, such as a bride she must console into going through with a wedding fueled by obligation rather than passion.

Lucy’s world, a highly stylized bubble of luxury and ambition, is inevitably ruptured by a love triangle that embodies the central thematic conflict: the quantifiable versus the immeasurable. On one side stands Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a suave, wealthy financier who is, by all accounts, a "unicorn" in Lucy's professional estimation a perfect blend of charm, physical desirability, and immense capital. Harry pursues Lucy with the same calculated efficiency he applies to his financial deals, showering her with the outward trappings of success: lavish dates, expensive gifts, and the promise of an effortless life in the highest tax bracket of New York society. Harry, for all his perfection, represents the logical extreme of Lucy's materialistic ideal. He is the guaranteed "safe" investment, a living embodiment of the checklist completed.

The other vertex of the triangle is John Finch (Chris Evans), Lucy’s earnest, charismatic ex-boyfriend who struggles as an actor and works menial jobs, like cater-waiting at Lucy’s clients’ elite weddings, to make ends meet. John represents the antithesis of Lucy's current aspirations: he is emotionally rich with a deep, shared history, but financially precarious. Their connection is instantly palpable, charged with the warmth of familiarity and the unresolved tension of a love that was once sacrificed on the altar of economic necessity. John serves as a constant, inconvenient reminder to Lucy that she once loved a man outside her current set of non-negotiable standards a man whose worth, she realizes, cannot be calculated in annual salary. The physical and emotional space of the film clearly defines this duality, contrasting the sterile, high-end opulence of Harry's world with the authentic, messy, and financially anxious reality of John's.

The film's genius lies in its refusal to make the choice easy by painting a villain. Harry is not a monster; he is, in many ways, an amiable, charming, and genuinely interested partner. His emotional core, however, proves to be as constructed as his financial one. The pivotal moment arrives when Lucy uncovers Harry's secret: a $200,000 tibial lengthening surgery he underwent to increase his height. This procedure an extreme, expensive investment to correct a perceived physical flaw shocks Lucy not because of the surgery itself, but because it exposes the profound insecurity and vanity beneath his "unicorn" façade. Harry's entire being is a product of wealth and a desperate attempt to purchase perfection and external validation. This realization leads to a profound moment of clarity for Lucy: their relationship is not love, but a mutually beneficial transaction where they are both "checking boxes" for one another, and in doing so, they are equally complicit in the materialist system they live in. They break up amicably, a testament to the fact that their disconnect is rooted in philosophy, not personal cruelty.

Simultaneously, the introduction of a dark, morally complex subplot involving Lucy’s client, Sophie, irrevocably shatters Lucy’s professional certainty. Sophie is sexually assaulted by a match Lucy made for her. This event acts as a brutal, necessary moral reckoning. It forces Lucy to confront the dehumanizing consequences of her job of reducing people to lists of attributes and ignoring the complex vulnerability inherent in human connection. The cold, corporate response of her agency, which attempts to sweep the incident under the rug, underscores the fundamental classism and amorality of the materialist system. Lucy’s subsequent sabbatical is less a break and more a deep, existential dive into the moral vacuum her career had created.

The ensuing reconnection with John becomes the crucible for Lucy's emotional and moral transformation. Their road trip away from the "Gilded Cage" of New York allows for an organic, non-transactional intimacy to be rekindled. Through simple, shared moments like gatecrashing a wedding, a scene beautifully framed by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner the film emphasizes the richness of shared experience and unscripted connection that had been absent in her curated life with Harry. The contrast is not simply between wealth and poverty, but between commodity and connection. John offers the intangible, the incalculable value of shared history and emotional support.

The climax arrives when Sophie, in a moment of panic and danger, reaches out to Lucy for help. Lucy and John immediately abandon their romantic interlude and rush back to the city. In this crisis, stripped of all artifice, John’s true worth as a partner is revealed through his capacity for selfless action and deep empathy. He is there for Lucy, supporting her as she helps Sophie file a restraining order, demonstrating an unconditional commitment that trumps any bank account. John’s final plea to Lucy is an act of profound vulnerability and honesty. He doesn't promise her a luxurious life, but he promises her his enduring, working love, challenging her to choose the brave, difficult, and beautiful choice of the heart over the safe, calculated choice of her head.

Lucy’s ultimate decision to choose John is the film’s decisive statement. The concluding scene the simple, heartfelt proposal with a ring made from a daisy, with John’s poignant question, “How would you like to make a very bad financial decision?” is a brilliant encapsulation of the film’s core theme. It connects back to the film’s prehistoric, metaphorical opening, suggesting that love, at its most fundamental, predates currency and capital; it is the most ancient and vital human resource. As director Celine Song herself asserted in response to critics calling the film "broke man propaganda," the film is fundamentally about "fighting the way that capitalism is trying to colonize our hearts and colonize love." By choosing John, Lucy rejects the insidious, classist notion that the poor are morally or personally flawed, and chooses instead the difficult, courageous path of valuing the immeasurable. Materialists concludes not with a perfect fairy tale, but with the honest, 50/50 odds of real life, affirming that authentic love is the ultimate act of defiance against a society that demands a price for everything. It is a powerful, modern masterwork that challenges the audience to re-examine what they truly value in the grand, complex calculus of life.

The final layer of the film is its powerful indictment of the ethical vacuum created by the commodification of love. The tragic subplot involving Lucy's client, Sophie, who is sexually assaulted by one of Lucy's "perfectly matched" men, is the narrative's necessary moment of moral reckoning. This sequence pulls the film out of the intellectual realm of love vs. money and into the fraught reality of gender, power, and safety in the modern dating landscape.

It exposes the hypocrisy of the entire system: the high-value checklist can screen for income and height, but it cannot screen for human decency or predatory behavior. Lucy's meticulous "math" fails catastrophically because it excludes the moral and emotional dimensions of human connection. The firm's cold, calculated attempt to manage the incident prioritizing legal and reputational risk over Sophie's well-being acts as the ultimate condemnation of the Materialist philosophy. It is at this moment that Lucy realizes her professional success has made her complicit in a brutal, dehumanizing system. The ethical collapse forces her to move from being an economist of affection to becoming an advocate for the vulnerable, an essential step in her journey back toward authentic love.

Adding a final, profound layer to the film’s thesis is the Neolithic framing device. The Materialists opens and closes with scenes of cave people in the Paleolithic era. This choice is Song’s way of establishing a primal, pre-materialist baseline for love. In these scenes, stripped of all economic and social structures, two figures engage in the first known "marriage," symbolized not by an exchange of gold or title deeds, but by a simple, mutual act of shared necessity (tools, fire) and intimacy (touch, shared silence). These moments serve as a quiet, powerful counterpoint to the high-stakes, high-stress New York romance. They ask the audience: If love is an immutable human constant, what does it look like when capitalism is completely removed from the equation? The ancient anchor suggests that the core of true connection is about survival, mutual support, and deep emotional resonance exactly what Lucy finds she missed with John and what she could never create with Harry, regardless of his wealth.

Ultimately, The Materialists is less a conventional love triangle and more a cinematic mirror reflecting the audience's own compromised values. Song doesn't just show Lucy's journey; she makes the viewer uncomfortable by having them, too, acknowledge the potent appeal of Harry’s financial security. Many viewers, consciously or subconsciously, initially root for the Pascal character because the promise of financial ease has become so deeply intertwined with the concept of a "happy ending" in modern culture. The movie expertly forces the audience to examine their own checklists and biases, questioning whether their romantic aspirations are driven by the search for a partner or the desire for an upgrade to their life status. By the time Lucy chooses John, the film challenges us to accept this outcome not as a fairy tale where money doesn't matter, but as a hard-won realization that some things matter more than money. It’s a messy, difficult choice, but one rooted in an aspiration for a richer emotional and moral life, rather than simply a richer bank account. This film is a crucial, unsettling intervention into the modern dialogue about success, feminism, and the enduring, yet besieged, human need for authentic love.

Finally, in its face-off between modern love, wealth, and ambition, The Materialists offers no sweet or simple conclusion. Instead, the film functions as a powerful cinematic mirror, forcing the audience to confront the extent to which capitalism has infiltrated their own romantic criteria. Lucy's final choice to pick John a man who promises genuine love, but not financial security is an act of radical defiance. It is a bold rejection of the narrative that a person's worth can be measured by the digits in their bank account. Cleverly, Celine Song positions The Materialists not merely as a superior romantic drama, but as an urgent moral statement about what is truly worth preserving in life: intimacy, shared history, and emotional integrity, which constitute a wealth that money simply cannot buy.