Yes and no: across the professional community, reactions to Materialists are conflicted. Some in the industry think the film accurately reflects a cynical and, well, materialist dating culture, while others think the Past Lives filmmaker isn’t giving matchmakers enough credit.
Beth Mandell, a longtime matchmaker at Lisa Clampitt Matchmaking, thinks the stock exchange promotion touches on something palpable in dating today. “They are marketing toward a relevant landscape where swipe culture is making people feel like they’re a commodity,” says Mandell.
“There’s a lot of dating app fatigue and people are tired. People are feeling like that in the movie, ‘We’re not merchandise, we’re people.’”
For those who are exhausted from swiping left, and can afford it, that’s where matchmakers come in.
When talking to clients, Mandell hears out their dating non-negotiables – height, income, age – but urges them to be flexible. Mandell’s boss, Lisa Clampitt, believes rigid requirements are a way of dealing with the scary unknowns of seeing someone new.
“People want control over something that you don’t have control over,” says Clampitt. “People’s lists help them feel like they know what they’re looking for. The reality is that a lot of people end up with someone that they could have never imagined.”
In Materialists, unrealistic requests prompt some of the funniest scenes and loudest groans. One middle-aged matchmaking client of Lucy’s only wants to have kids with someone under 30. Another wants to find a fellow conservative lesbian in New York City.
Those types of requests aren’t uncommon, says Liana Bell, head of member experience at Bond Select Dating, but they do make the search for lasting relationships more challenging.
“I do find the clients that are the most successful are the ones that don’t necessarily have that Build-A-Bear mentality,” says Bell, who worked in passing with Song in the late 2010s at Tawkify.
“Those are actually the clients I love working with. They trust the human calibration elements, some of these things we ignore on the apps in terms of treating it like a mathematical equation.”
While Materialists is receiving acclaim, including from the Post’s Ann Hornaday, who described it as “a little bit funny and all too real”, several matchmakers have struggled with the film’s lack of customary rom-com froth, others with its starkly transactional marketing campaign.
The stock exchange promotion left a sour taste in the mouth of Maria Avgitidis, the CEO of Agape Match and the author of Ask a Matchmaker.
“Based on your little matrix, my husband has zero per cent value because he wasn’t making six figures at the age of 35, because he wasn’t six-foot-four, because he doesn’t have a full head of hair,” says Avgitidis. “How cynical is Celine Song to have okayed this type of marketing material for this movie?”
After seeing the trailers, which played up Materialists as a rom-com in the tradition of Nora Ephron or James L. Brooks, some matchmakers felt cheated out of a story worth swooning over. And when it came to one darker plot beat involving one of Lucy’s clients, Avgitidis was shocked.
“Midway through the movie, when it stopped being a romantic comedy, I had sunk into my seat,” says Avgitidis. “I just felt, for the first time in my entire career, like a little shocked and embarrassed. I was like, ‘Okay, this is how we’re being painted.’ I did not expect it.”
Other aspects of the movie, like the lack of preparation that Johnson’s character does before pairing her clients, rang false to Amy Van Doran, the CEO of Modern Love Club, a dating service. One scene that stood out was when Lucy’s agency threw a party after two of her clients got engaged. Van Doran says matchmakers rarely celebrate their work on that scale.
“I felt so bad for my assistant, because in the last two months she got three engagements and I threw her no party,” laughs Van Doran. “But I’m not super motivated by pieces of cake. I’m really motivated by how we made two people feel less alone in the world and gave them something to be optimistic about.”
But even those who didn’t love the film appreciated some aspects of its portrayal of the industry – especially its depiction of the way clients so freely open up to matchmakers about their aspirations or icks for potential partners.
“The first 20 minutes of the movie are 1000% accurate of what it looks like when you talk to new people,” says Avgitidis. “The professional matchmaker now has to balance the wish list with the reality check. Some clients are not interested in a reality check.”
The film has found some high-profile fans in the matchmaking community, including Patti Stanger from the reality show The Millionaire Matchmaker, who tweeted that the film’s stock market promotion was “Brilliant!” And even if they haven’t seen it yet, it appears that some of Van Doran’s clients are excited about the movie.
“All of my male clients, they’re asking for Dakota Johnson. I got four emails this week being like, ‘Hey, we want to date Dakota.’ Not someone who is like her, the real Dakota Johnson,” says Van Doran, who thinks the belief that dating Johnson is a realistic option is a symptom of overexposure to online dating.
“We’re dating alone and swiping. We’re not dating in communities. People think that just whatever they think they want is available.”
Materialists is in New Zealand cinemas now.
