When I saw the trailer for this movie I thought it was going to be just another lightweight millennial romcom valorising Strong Young Women at the expense of hapless, faithless men, with lashings of high-end fashion and mind-blowing extravagance.  Sort of Pretty Woman meets The Devil Wears Prada. 

But then I read some reviews which said it was an interesting new take on the age-old dilemma: should you marry for love or money?  Director Celine Song’s first movie Past Lives had gathered serious critical praise and Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay in 2023, so off I gadded to see Materialists.   

Well, there is plenty of fashion but it’s not overplayed, and the mind-blowing extravagance is not gratuitous; it’s a central element of the story.   

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a pretty twenty-something New Yorker who works for a matchmaking agency, staffed entirely by female ‘consultants’, by the looks.  When one of the team scores a marriage, the company throws a mini-party with champagne and cake.  The girls all gather round her, hugging and air-kissing, screeching and giggling in a show of mutual celebration as cringe-making as when the losers of beauty contests pretend to be over the moon with delight that someone else won.  We suspect similar fake sentiment here.

Lucy is good at her job, having just clocked up nine marriages.  She’s something of a trouble-shooter too.  When one of her clients gets cold feet on her wedding day, bride-whisperer Lucy coaxes from her the confession that the real reason she’s marrying this fellow is that he’s richer and taller than her sister’s husband and she wants to make her sister jealous.  Lucy doesn’t browbeat her about ruining the wedding for which her parents have paid squillions, she simply reassures the bride that this is a perfectly okay reason to get married.  It works.  The bride uncurls from her foetal position on the bed and the wedding goes ahead.  

Lucy herself is currently single and celibate by choice, having dumped her last boyfriend John – played by young and handsome Chris Evans – because he wasn’t rich enough.  She’ll tell anyone who cares to listen that any future boyfriend or husband of hers will have to be uber-rich.    

At the sumptuous wedding of her latest client she attracts the attention of Harry, (Pedro Pascal) a private equity investor who comes from old money and has oodles of it.  He fancies her not just because she’s young and pretty but because he likes her hard-headed attitude to love and romance.  As he tells her later, he likes a woman who knows how the world works.  

He’s thoughtful and charming and good-looking, albeit perhaps not as good-looking as John, who’s also at the wedding, working as a waiter to supplement his income as a struggling actor.  He offers to drive Lucy home and that old flame begins to rekindle.  

And so the stage is set for the money vs love battle.  

It would seem to be a lay-down misere for Harry, and yet, and yet…. John may still be living in the same grotty digs, with the same grotty housemates and driving the same old bomb from which she stormed out after their last argument, but his play is opening soon Off-Broadway and after all, he ‘voted for Bernie’ (Sanders) at the last election, a signal of virtue if ever I saw one.  

There’s a lot to like about Materialists.  

I like the way it doesn’t pussyfoot around the harsh eternal truths about love and sex: women want rich men.  Rich men want women who are beautiful and above all, young. 

I like the way Song makes Lucy honest enough to interrogate her own mercenary motives, and to admit her own shortcomings in this rat race.  There’s a nice scene where she tells Harry he’s what’s known in the trade as a ‘unicorn’ – a uniquely desirable property who could have any woman he wanted.  She points out that the only currency she has to offer is youth and looks, which will fade.  She says the aura of glamour and affluence that surrounds her is purely superficial; she comes from a poor background and makes only $80,000 a year!  

Which comes as a surprise to us, but it doesn’t put Harry off.  

I could have wished for more backstory about Harry, especially about his previous love life.  He’s older than Lucy and John … why is he single?

Some critics have said the ending of Materialists is a reversion to romcom cliché which undoes all the good work of the insightful script and savvy dialogue.  They have a point.  But it is an enjoyable movie.  Go with a girlfriend while your blokes go and see the new Brad Pitt movie.  Having had a surfeit of relationship heart-to-hearts with Materialists, I’m thinking of taking in F1 next week myself.  Vroom vroom.