“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

–Kurt Vonnegut

I had a difficult time reviewing Past Lives. Yes, it’s widely regarded as a great romantic drama, and I’m happy to agree with that assessment, but with the vital caveat that the movie was a dreadfully slow burn until that dynamite third act. It’s also crucial to remember that the movie was largely based on writer/director Celine Song’s own personal life, which brought so much heft and heart to the proceedings. Trouble is, that trick only works once.

Yet here we are with Materialists, a film starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans at the heights of their respective stardoms. Yet the film was promoted almost as heavily on the involvement of Celine Song, with the implicit expectation that she’d be able to work her magic a second time. She doesn’t, of course, but it’s a good film nonetheless.

We lay our scene in NYC, the ultimate have/have-not city, where celebrities and billionaires live and work in close proximity with the gutter-dwellers all day and every day. Johnson plays Lucy, who came from a dirt-poor background and moved to New York for an acting career. After that fell apart, she came into a lucrative and massively successful career working for a matchmaking agency. In fact, shortly after the film picks up, we learn that Lucy is directly responsible for nine marriages and counting.

Of course that’s not to say it’s all perfect. She’s still dealing with rich and entitled Manhattanites afraid they’re going to die alone unless they find someone to check off every last box on their wish list. It certainly doesn’t help that these same clients don’t want to waste their time and money on something that doesn’t work, and they don’t want to hear that every date is inherently a risk. (Especially since, again, they’re paying for the promise of a Happily Ever After with their dreamboat.)

The upshot is that Lucy is basically stuck playing a kind of therapist. She’s dealing with people’s softest vulnerabilities and deepest insecurities, trying to assure her clients that they are in fact worth loving and love is worth fighting for. Thus — in an effort to cope with the psychological stresses of her job and to speak in a language her clients can understand — she’s come to think of her clients in terms of height, weight, age, income, and other numbers on a sheet. Her clients are simply checklists and her job is simply math.

This comes with a number of obvious drawbacks that inevitably come back to bite her as the plot unfolds. First and foremost, that not even Lucy herself seems to know how much she believes in what she’s selling.

Now, you may be asking where our male leads factor into all this. Well, Harry (Pascal) is what Lucy and her colleagues call a “unicorn”: A single man, devastatingly handsome, obscenely wealthy, no problems with drugs or mistresses, well-spoken, educated, classy… he’s impossibly perfect. He’s everything a woman could want, and Lucy could make a fortune setting him up with any of her clients. Except that Harry wants her specifically, because game recognizes game and he respects her that much.

On the other hand, we’ve got John (Evans). He and Lucy were dating for five years until she left him because he was broke. All this time later, he’s still broke, still struggling to make ends meet as an actor in NYC, and still in love with Lucy.

The good news is that there’s no adversarial relationship between any of the players in our love triangle. I don’t think John and Harry trade three words in the whole picture. No, the issue here is that Lucy spends the whole movie dithering about her love life and stringing along both of these men in the process of figuring out her own personal and professional hangups.

Cutting through all of Lucy’s bullshit, what it comes down to is that Harry is everything Lucy wants to be and pretends she is. But John is everything Lucy came from, and everything she still is in those deepest and darkest places she can’t ignore no matter how hard she tries.

Though he’s still a nice and loyal well-intentioned guy who looks like Chris Evans, so take that for what you will regarding what it says about Lucy.

At the outset, Lucy says “there’s no such thing as ugly, only poor.” She says she wants a massively wealthy husband, but that’s a chickenshit excuse. In fact, Lucy has only set her sights so high because she’s waiting for a man who doesn’t exist. Because she doesn’t actually want love. Because she’s convinced herself that she’s a piece of shit who doesn’t deserve it. She says all of her clients do, but not her.

From start to finish, the film and the characters act on the hypothesis that an ideal match means a partnership between two people who raise each other’s “value”. It’s a modern interpretation of older marriage customs, in which marriage was arranged as a business transaction with dowries and properties and royal lineages at stake. And sure, money problems remain a depressingly common reason why relationships break up. But here in the modern world — as Lucy comes to find out over the course of the film — the concept of a person’s “value” is nebulous at best.

Which brings us to the movie’s true secret weapon: Sophie, played by Zoe Winters. She’s one of Lucy’s most challenging clients, a perfectly sensible and attractive woman who’s acceptable in all metrics but doesn’t have any one excellent trait to commend her (going by New York standards, anyway). Unfortunately, Sophie proves herself to be far more complicated and layered than numbers on a page. She is a very real person with very real needs and fears, and not at all like any of Lucy’s other more shallow and self-absorbed clients.

The end result is that things with Sophie go bad. They go bad in unspeakable ways. The poor woman serves as a harsh and necessary reminder to Lucy that the “intangibles” are real and crucially important. With her clients and with her own love life, Lucy is playing with fire. She’s taking risks with people’s lives and futures here. And it sucks that dating can have such highly unpredictable life-or-death stakes in the modern world, but here we are.

So why do we put ourselves and each other through all of this? Why do we put someone else in the ideal place to dish out the worst of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual harm? Why do we put years of time and exorbitant money into getting hitched with someone else for the next fifty years, or at least until something goes horribly wrong?

Well, the film offers a few possible answers. For one, when something terrible happens, it’s nice to have someone who will always have your back no matter what. For another thing, it’s nice to hope that things will work out and the highs will be worth the lows. But most of all, the film posits that love — twoo wuv — is the easiest thing in the world. To find a true sole mate is to find someone so easy and effortless to love that you can’t not love them. Even against all reason.

Beauty fades. Money comes and goes. Material assets and superficial details all crumble away in the end. But the intangibles — those qualities that make a person worthy to love and be loved in return — are everlasting. That’s the “value” that increases with a strong match.

The film has a lot to say about love, marriage, relationships, and security in a world where materialism is everything, nobody has any patience for anything beyond the superficial, everybody is made to feel worthless unless they get the perfect match society owes them, and there’s no line drawn between wants and needs. And I do appreciate how the film navigates all these topics in a practical and even-handed way without going too far into schmaltz. Of course it certainly doesn’t hurt that we’re watching Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans through all of this.

The problem is that while Song is clearly trying to duplicate the sincerity and heart that made Past Lives such a hit, she’s trying it without the real-life pathos that Past Lives came from. And there’s nothing to replace that spark. The best we get are three insanely good-looking actors looking into each other’s eyes, but it’s not enough. Our headliners are all marvelous talents and I’m sure they could generate the necessary chemistry, but not while they’re getting dragged down by Song’s characteristic slow pacing and Lucy’s characteristic dithering. The end result is a noticeable void where it feels like there should be some degree of heat or intimacy.

Materialists is another tough one. It’s certainly well-made and well-cast with its head and heart in the right places. Yet even with all so many elegant and thoughtful statements about the nature of love and marriage in the modern world, sitting through this movie still felt like taking a two-mile hike with a pebble in my shoe.

While this is certainly a good movie on the whole, it’s still a bit of a slog to get through and there’s a strong sense that it doesn’t quite live up to the filmmakers’ ambitious intentions. Time will tell if this turns out to be as beloved as Past Lives, but I think it’s safe to say that Celine Song needs a new gimmick. I don’t think she can get away with a leaden-paced and introspective romantic drama a third time. And if she does, she’ll make nothing else for the rest of her career.