A Review of “Materialists” by Celine Song

The title of Celine Song’s new movie is apt. She portrays a Manhattan culture of unapologetic materialism. What matters is money, youth, good looks, height, power, and, well, money. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker. She works for a company with the cringy name Adore. She’s already getting a bit old for this gig. The other matchmakers in the office seem younger and sillier. They like nothing more than a party and a cake to celebrate a successful match.

Despite Adore’s attempt to suggest otherwise, there is little romance in this business. As Lucy patiently explains to clueless clients, matches are about material value—checking the boxes. A good match parlays one’s assets—mostly money, youth, and looks—to acquire a partner of equal or greater value. It’s love as competition, relationship as free enterprise. Like a successful realtor, she helps clients to assess their value on the market, what they bring to the table and what they reasonably can hope to acquire. The movie is shot through with brief interviews with clients specifying what they will accept and not accept. One perhaps 40-something man wants to begin dating older women. When Lucy suggests someone in the range of 30, he insists that 30 is far too old. 27 is as far as he will go.

No one is better at this game than Lucy. She is clear-eyed about her clients, persistent, realistic, and comforting. She knows how to check the boxes. She sells the dream: a relationship that will last until the couple become “nursing home partners” and “grave buddies.” But she expects less. Even a good match will not survive children and age. Marriages are transactional—for the moment, not forever.

The director Song was herself a matchmaker in New York. She knows the game. She understands that marriage has always been in some measure transactional. Once it was a transaction between families involving bride prices and dowries. Or, as one character in the movie has it, cows. In today’s upscale Manhattan society, it’s about status and validation. But clearly Song is not satisfied with that answer. What about love? Where in all this does love belong? What even is love?

Among the Manhattan materialists something appears to be missing. Call it history or connection—anything that might embed love in something larger and stronger than the whims of two people. Song’s first feature film, the much-acclaimed Past Lives (2023), explores the idea of embedded relationships under the Korean Buddhist concept of inyeon: the idea that past encounters, even brief encounters, establish karmic connections. Relationships trail along with them a long train of past lives.

Past Lives opens in a New York speakeasy. An anonymous couple in the bar observe a threesome: two men, one Korean, the other Jewish, and a Korean woman. They speculate about the relationships among the three. What brings the three together? With that question planted, Song takes the movie viewer back to 1999, to Seoul, to a playdate between 12-year-olds, Na Young and Hae Sung. The two, on the verge of adolescence, are taken with each other, but the relationship is soon cut short. Na Young’s family moves to America. She becomes Nora Moon. She and Hae Sung lose touch until, through an accident of an internet search and a family connection, they find each other online. For a while they reestablish their relationship through regular video calls, she in New York and he in Seoul. But they have lives: he wants to study Mandarin in China; she has been awarded time at a writer’s retreat house in Montauk. They decide to end the calls. Nora meets a fellow writer, Arthur, and they marry. But Hae Sung is not done. He takes it upon himself to come to New York to meet Nora in person.

The couple, still shy from their time together as 12-year-olds, spend time together in New York. Exploring New York, they explore again their relationship. They speak Korean with each other. They share what Nora cannot easily share with Arthur, her husband. It’s this visit that brings us to the dinner in the speakeasy where the movie begins. What will happen? Will Nora remain with Arthur? Or will she explore what she had lost with Hae Sung? And if she stays with Arthur, what will become of their relationship? Will it grow stronger? Or will be bruised and damaged by the possibility of Hae Sung? I’ll not spoil the movie for you by answering these questions. The movie is well worth watching.

The point is not how Song resolves the questions in Past Lives but the artful way that she sets the inyeon depth of relationship between Nora and Hae Sung against the cross cultural relationship of Nora and Arthur, testing the one against the other. In Materialists, in contrast, it’s all Noras and Arthurs. There is no deep past to any of the relationships, little or no social depth, no extended families, cultural connections, community. Nothing outside of the transactional. Or, almost nothing.

In a single night at a glossy Manhattan wedding, Lucy meets two potential partners. One is Harry (Pedro Pascal). In the terminology of the matchmaking industry, Harry is a unicorn. He’s rich, good-looking, charming, has no deal-breaking bad habits; in Lucy’s own professional estimate, Harry is “perfect.” The other is John (Chris Evans), an ex of some ten years earlier, a failed actor, broke, still living with the same slovenly roommates as ten years before. You don’t have to have watched many romcoms to see where this is going. 

But again, how the movie resolves the Harry or John question is not the point that Song is exploring in the movie. The point is love. What is it? How do you find it? And when you find it, what does it look like? And, more important than any of those questions, can love survive in the toxic atmosphere of modern materialist society? Can love grow not only in gritty Seoul, as in Past Lives, but in glitzy Manhattan? Or will the materialism of New York grind love down into the bitterness of failed relationships? 

What I sense in Song’s work is a longing for cultural depth. There are two things missing in Lucy’s world in Materialists. What’s missing first are those broader relationships that are not one on one: friendship, family, faith, neighborhood, and work. History and culture: inyeon. Relationships that carry with them relationships that include parents and grandparents, classmates and neighbors, those whom in the course of life we have touched and those who have touched us. These multiple human connections help frame and support the fragility of marriage relationships. Absent these other kinds of relationships, marriage threatens to descend into the transactional. It becomes economic. One is tempted to ask: am I getting out of this relationship what I am putting in? And when it becomes transactional, love loses.

But there is another element missing in Lucy’s world, and this element is perhaps even more important. In the Materialist world, love seems to exist only as a somewhat mysterious and perhaps spiritual state. Love happens to you. And when it does, the characters in the movie assure each other, it’s easy. It comes over you, and when love comes over you, it sweeps you along into a sort of never-never-land.

But this is magical thinking. It’s not that sweep-you-off-your-feet attraction cannot be part of love. It often is, I hope, even in the Adore world. The Greeks had a name for it: eros. Eros is part of the joy of love. But the joy of love requires something more. It requires love not just as something that happens to you, but something you do. Love as a virtue. Love in the Alasdair MacIntyre sense of a practice: something you have to learn, something you can get good at. The joy of love may begin in eros, but it is sustained in the practices and enactments of love. Song appears to be working towards this idea of love: love as something you do.

Near the end of the movie, Lucy and John crash a wedding. The wedding is somewhere upstate of the city. The people attending the wedding have none of the glitziness of the Manhattan crowd. They look like ordinary people. I noticed particularly, as of course I would, the preacher, who is short and, well, not good looking. But there is joy in the event. The relationships appear to be familiar, longstanding. People know each other. Lucy and John sit apart from the guests, cynically commenting on the proceedings. But they are the ones missing out.

And missing out not just on love but on life. The title of Song’s movie evokes our present culture more broadly. We live in a time in which relationships—not just romantic relationships but relationships in general—are taken by those in power to be transactional. This is true not only for personal relationships, we are told, but for political relationships. Notions of loyalty and responsibility and even empathy are for losers. And this is true, it’s claimed, not just for local and national politics but for the relationships among nations. Relationships are measured in terms of winning and losing.

But this way of thinking leads manifestly to the loss of the very thing that makes life worth living. In Materialists, Celine Song suggests in Materialists, materialism is not enough. As Jesus put it, “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose their soul.”

What indeed?

Clay