Materialists

Playwright Celine Song follows up her wonderful, Oscar-nominated first feature, Past Lives, with this distinctly more mainstream romantic drama about a young, ambitious, decidedly unromantic NYC matchmaker who finds herself torn between her perfect match (at least by her company's criteria) and her imperfect (by any metric) ex-boyfriend. The movie suffers somewhat from the miscasting of Dakota Johnson in the lead role. Johnson's distinctly reserved, sometimes opaque screen presence (so ideal for supporting roles in films like A Bigger Splash, The Lost Daughter, and Cha Cha Real Smooth; and more than a match for Sean Penn in the prior year's solid but unfortunately-titled two-hander Daddio) lacks the submerged warmth nessessary for a character like this to work fully. Materialists is not a romantic comedy; it's a romantic drama, closer in tone to Song's cerebral yet emotionally raw debut than to, say, My Best Friend's Wedding. Still, the film's glossy, high-end veneer and the specifics of the character conflicts feel far more like an old-school rom-com, and it cries out for the contemporary equivalent of the thirty-something Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock to make the character arc feel genuinely satisfying.