Film Review—”Materialists”
“Materialists” is a Jane Austen composite story where all her commentary and themes about social class, money, marriage being a business transaction, are all brought to the forefront and said out loud. Really loud. I think she’d like this movie. And so did I.
Love and marriage are beautiful, but money is pernicious and tricks our brains into believing things we may not really believe, and convince ourselves of things that aren’t actually true. Owning personal wealth, and for someone to spend their personal wealth on us makes us feel valued. It makes us feel important and richer, pun intended. We feel more valued and flattered during a meal at a Michelin-star restaurant where dessert comes with a pair of Cartier earrings than we do at Olive Garden. But that feeling isn’t love, it’s novelty. We aren’t used to getting those gifts, so they feel special. Being treated extravagantly makes us feel chosen—you value me enough to deem me worthy of this restaurant, that vacation, these flowers, those shoes—and worthy of luxury and attention.
Eventually, the earrings, the bracelet that follows the earrings, and the necklace that follows the bracelet, won’t feel special anymore, we won’t feel as valuable anymore because they become routine gifts. Our partner has to find other extravagances to purchase for us, and at a point, we’re just spending money on each other chasing the dopamine surge we get from fancy gifts because the bar keeps getting higher and higher. None of this is love. It’s a series of transactions to chase a high.
Love isn’t getting what we want from our partner all the time, materially. The jewelry and trips do matter because shared luxuries signals that your partner prioritizes you in mind, and in their finances, more than themselves. But love and love-in-dating and marriage is recognizing that the feeling we crave of value isn’t printed on a price tag. It comes in being present for someone when no one else is. It comes in going to watching the movie you hate with them because you know it makes them happy for two hours their happiness is more important than yours. It comes in driving across town to rescue them when they’ve made a dumb decision, because regardless of how angry or hurt you are, making sure they’re safe is the priority. All the other non-flashy ways of making a partner feel valued, keeping them safe and healthy. The luxuries are nice, treats that are plenty enjoyable in small amounts because in too high proportion, they’re not treats anymore. And you can’t enjoy the treats, the treats don’t really matter, if you’re not safe in bed at night.
There’s been plenty of debate, especially on Letterboxd, about whether Materialists accurately portrays what it means to be “poor” and how realistic Lucy’s life is on $80,000 a year. But I think that criticism misses the film’s message. The point, from where I sit, is how critical the feeling of being valued is to a relationship, and how severely we misunderstand it, and how to demonstrate it to someone. Money is the easiest and fastest way to manufacture the feeling of value, but like any other drug, the high wears off. All of us want to feel valuable, but our capitalist society that creates immense wealth gaps has turned us into people who think money is the best way to prove someone is valuable in our eyes. It’s the best way to express love and the most reliable way to receive it. The things that don’t come in a Bulgari box seem every day and less significant, but we’d miss them if they were gone.
Both Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans are also well cast, and director Celine Song does an excellent job of writing them as both believable and desirable partners, you’re not really rooting for either one of them. You keep waiting for the ball to drop with Pascal’s Harry, but it never does, because he doesn’t do anything wrong except live in and react accordingly to our capitalist, materialistic world that values nice apartments and men over six feet tall. And Chris Evan’s John’s sin is that the field he cares the most about—though his comment about ‘someone told me I was good at it once’ provokes doubt if it’s really his passion—is that it doesn’t put him in the $400,000 a year category. It’s important for conveying Song’s statement about value that both of them are attractive, appealing, and easy to root for because Lucy and us the audience have to be on even-playing fields, comparing apples to apples to understand the perniciousness role of money, because if one of them wasn’t incredibly handsome, well, we and Lucy would focus on that instead, because we’re all materialists and can’t help ourselves. Money and class have to be the only difference between them to recognize the problem isn’t them, it’s our deep-seated, conscious and subconscious obsession with money and gaining wealth.
As philosopher McCartney once said, “money can’t buy me love.” Materialists doesn’t disagree but takes it a step further. We all want to feel—and deserve to feel—valued in relationship marriage. But our society founded on capitalism and tricked out with advertising about glamorous hotels and jewelry and clothes, and has perverted our sense of value in that it’s taught us to equal value with financial cost. We’ve always put a price tag on love; centuries ago it was a dowry; the more substantial the exchange of money, the more significant the union. Today, the same rule still applies, the currency of courtship has changed, but the transaction remains the same.
