REVIEW: Materialists offers a shallow couple of hours in the cinema

In a flashback we see Lucy (Dakota Johnson) in a traffic jam screaming at her struggling-actor boyfriend John (Chris Evans) that it’s all over – for the simple reason that she doesn’t want to end up hating him just because he’s poor.

In the present, she’s a successful New York City matchmaker, essentially matching wealth (plus a few favourable physical attributes) with wealth (plus a few favourable physical attributes). Yep, all you need to know is in the film’s title. She’s chosen to operate in a world of materialists, and it’s in this context that she finds herself increasingly drawn to a “unicorn”, a match so unbelievably perfect that he’s regarded as preciously rare. And is therefore all the more desirable still. Never mind that he is utterly bland, devoid of all personality and comes with a dodgy Peter Bowles-lookalike moustache.

Lucy is fond of “doing the math” and Harry (Pedro Pascal) adds up perfectly in her shallow world even if he feels slightly creepy to the rest of us. And well, rich perfection is always going to be so much better than impoverished imperfection, isn’t it… even if the latter does at least come with a quirky interesting character and a spark of life. The film therefore becomes all about the choice that Lucy is some day soon going to have to make.

Surely she’s not so awful that she’s going to opt for Harry, you hope. Even if you can see beyond the moustache, there are plenty of other warning signs. After all, we are talking about a guy who, at vast expense, has opted to have both his legs broken in a bizarre operation which somehow gave him an extra six inches in height – and apparently doubled his value in the singles market. Are we straying into some kind of satire here? Sadly, it’s not terribly funny.

But another warning bell rings elsewhere. Lucy is somehow surprised when the seemingly perfect match she assigns to one of her clients promptly assaults the client. Slowly Lucy tumbles to the fact that salary, job and height aren’t the full man. Character has to come into the reckoning too.

There’s hope for poor John, poor financially but perhaps rich in all the significant respects. You find yourself rooting for him…. and just hoping that something is going to shove Lucy in the right direction. But it’s a pretty shallow couple of hours in the cinema.