Celine Song's 'Materialists' is a drama dressed up in rom-com trappings

Among the many lamentable casualties of the streaming era has been the loss of big screen romance. There’s a received wisdom in executive offices that people would rather watch love stories at home, which is how you get dumb decisions like this past spring’s much-better-than-expected “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” doing blockbuster business overseas and going straight to Peacock in the U.S. (I don’t even know anyone who has Peacock.) Netflix may be overrun with rom-coms, but theatrical moviegoers are so starved for affection that an admittedly rickety vehicle like Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s “Much Ado About Nothing” riff “Anyone But You” grossed $220 million at the worldwide box office. Meanwhile, blockbusters like “Twisters” and “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” won’t even allow their characters to kiss.

It's sad because one of the great pleasures of going to the movies is watching attractive people fall in love. There’s almost primal emotional satisfaction in gazing up at big, beautiful faces as they realize they can’t live without each other. Writer-director Celine Song’s “Materialists” is a movie about such faces, and at its best, it reminds us how enjoyable it can be just to look at them sometimes. The film is a talky, cerebral romance in the same mode as the filmmaker’s 2023 Best Picture-nominated debut “Past Lives,” again focused on an aloof, hyper-articulate woman being pursued by two imperfect men who love her even though she’s not sure what she wants. You might say Song has a type. (It also might raise an eyebrow that her husband Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay for 2024’s randy tennis drama “Challengers” put a saucy spin on the same formula.) But whereas Song’s first film built to a climax of overwhelming emotional force, “Materialists” doesn’t stick the landing. In fact, it might still be circling the runway.

Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a matchmaker for an elite Manhattan agency that finds mates for the wealthy. She’s very good at what she does, and when we meet her she’s on her way to the ninth wedding that’s resulted from one of her pairings. But Lucy brushes off any compliments, insisting that her job is “just math,” arranging incomes and interests accordingly. At the aforementioned wedding, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the obscenely rich bachelor brother of the groom and exactly the kind of big fish Lucy would love to recruit for her agency’s services. Tall, dark, handsome — and most importantly, loaded — he checks all the boxes her clients are looking for. But Harry’s more interested in the saleswoman than the pitch.

Also at that same wedding is John, Lucy’s struggling actor ex-boyfriend who works as a cater-waiter. He’s played by an endearingly messy Chris Evans, gazing at his old girlfriend in obvious adoration while reluctantly going along with this new arrangement of just being friends. Harry checks all of Lucy’s proverbial boxes: he’s rich, handsome, solicitous and madly in love with her. John is 37 years old, his acting career is going nowhere and his alcoholic roommates leave used condoms on the living room floor. If you’ve ever seen a romantic comedy before, you know where this is going.

The thing is, though, that “Materialists” isn’t a romantic comedy. It’s a muted drama dressed up in rom-com trappings. Song is trying to take the heightened genre conventions and bring them back down to Earth. These characters are always talking about what characters aren’t supposed to talk about in pictures like this: money. Because fancy places and nice things are more pleasurable for audiences to look at, in most movie romances privilege is a given. In “Materialists” it’s a demand, with Lucy’s clients listing their salary and height minimums for potential dates. (The height thing is an especially big deal here.) The film has a lot to say about how modern dating apps and agencies have turned looking for Mr. Goodbar into ordering him a la carte, and maybe the most stressful part of Lucy’s job is trying to manage her clients’ expectations.

Song started out as a playwright — her acclaimed “Endlings” premiered at the American Repertory Theater in 2019 — and much of “Materialists” takes the form of stagey, well-acted, one-on-one scenes during which characters are especially eloquent about the screenplay’s themes. Everything is transactional, so most conversations are negotiations, to a point where plastic surgery is compared to apartment renovations. The movie argues not unconvincingly that for most people, romance is a matter of adding value to your investments. Lucy doesn’t make matches so much as she oversees mergers. She doesn’t know if she loves Harry, but he makes her feel valuable.

A terrific actress who isn’t always well-served by the projects she picks, Johnson has become semi-notorious in movies like “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “Madame Web” for amusing herself at the expense of the picture she’s stuck in. (The four or five of us who saw last year’s “Daddio” know how good she can be when she trusts the material.) Playing a girl who grew up poor trying to maneuver herself through spaces of extreme wealth, Johnson maintains an unflappable affect so poised it’s almost flat. Lucy is a tricky role because she’s always reciting lines from a script she’s already prepared in her head. Except whenever she sees her old boyfriend, the only guy who’s able to knock her off her game.

The movie is smartly cast in this regard. Pedro Pescal is convincingly debonair and sometimes looks uncannily like Burt Reynolds with that moustache. But, as we saw last year when he and Paul Mescal got blown off the screen by Denzel Washington in “Gladiator II,” there’s something a little too TV-sized about his screen presence. Like the character of Harry, he checks all the boxes but is still slightly smaller than life. Evans, on the other hand, who hasn’t given a decent performance or appeared in a remotely watchable movie since “Knives Out” in 2019, is fantastic as Lucy’s unkempt ex.

The Sudbury native returns to the forthright, uncomplicated decency that made those first two “Captain America” movies the high water mark of the whole Marvel project. Evans can pull off the kind of straight arrow goodness we haven’t seen since Christopher Reeve played “Superman,” and while his post-Cap roles have shown that he might not be capable of much else, “Materialists” proves it’s more than enough. John and Lucy both understand that he can’t give her what she wants, but we understand why she finds herself wanting him anyway.

“Materialists” is too high-minded a movie to come up with a contrived misunderstanding that results in a classic, rom-com running-through-the-airport ending. (Though one could convincingly argue that the third act crisis the screenplay substitutes instead, involving one of Lucy’s clients, is actually worse. Maybe even offensive, given what it trivializes.) Without that kind of corny, conventional catharsis, the film doesn’t end so much as it deflates into the closing credits. You’ll smile and shrug on your way out of the theater, probably thinking that the movie could have used a few more jokes, but it sure was nice looking at those big, lovestruck faces.

“Materialists” is now in theaters.