'The Materialists' Finally Gives Us The Dakota Johnson Showcase We All Knew Was Possible
The girl who knows too much.
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It’s funny to think back to the days when most of us first became aware of Dakota Johnson, for costarring in the much-hyped Fifty Shades of Grey, as “Anastasia Steele,” a shy, sheltered virgin who learns to open up thanks to her wealthy new boyfriend Christian Grey, who introduces her to a whole new world of mildly freaky S&M sexplay. If you were to design a role specifically formulated to accentuate all of Dakota Johnson’s worst qualities and downplay her best ones, you couldn’t do much better than Anastasia Steele, the ultimate ingenue of Twilight fan-fiction fever dreams. (Fifty Shades being a hilarious hybrid of a Mormon housewife’s idealized idea of love repackaged by a British marketing professional into light bondage erotica).
Johson has had plenty of better showcases for her talents in the decade since, but another role in particular stands out: Cassandra Webb in the disastrous-yet-perfect-corporate-time-capsule Madame Web. Johnson won a Razzie for Worst Actress for the role (fuck the Razzies), but if you watched it with a certain kind of eye, Madame Web was actually a pretty good showcase for a lot of the qualities that make Dakota Johnson particularly alluring. She’s certainly attractive in a more understated kind of way than, say, her Madame Web co-star Sydney Sweeney, (and that normal-hot quality is probably what got her cast in Fifty Shades in the first place), but even more so than that, she does this thing where she sort of smirks like she knows a secret and she’s debating whether to let you in on it.
In one of Madame Web’s most fascinatingly bizarre scenes, Johnson goes to a suburban cookout where she wants to drink a beer but reluctantly accepts a Pepsi instead (one of many overt bits of product placement in the movie). She proceeds to spends the next nearly five full minutes of screentime wandering around the party, chatting with friends, and staring off into the distance, all while absent-mindedly fiddling with a can of Pepsi that she never opens. I mention it because being forced to ask questions like Why isn’t she opening the damn Pepsi? Does she know something I don’t? Why am I intrigued by this?? seems central to Dakota Johnson’s appeal. In a world of overactors, she’s very much an underactor. And it’s not because there’s nothing there (*cough* Kristen Stewart *cough, cough*), it feels more like she’s merely withholding something — a confident kind of shyness.
The Materialists director Celine Song seems to understood this appeal better than anyone. To the point that there’s a scene in the film that feels almost like a tongue-in-cheek callback to Madame Web’s preposterous Pepsi scene. Johnson, playing cynical wedding planner Lucy, is sitting at a wedding table being chat up by suave rich guy Pedro Pascal. He asks for her drink order, and as soon as the words are barely out of her mouth, her ex, played by Chris Evans, is already there with the actual order. “Coke and a beer,” she says, as he plunks down a full bottle of Coca-Cola and a half-full glass a beer*.
Drink specifics aside (and who the hell serves half a beer???), this seems to highlight some of Johnson’s specific peculiarities — that she’s mysterious and worldly, might know something that you don’t, and is also bold and vulnerable in an understated way; enough to order a drink that she knows you’ll think is bizarre and weird, because she’s secure in what she likes.
The Materialists is basically the reverse Fifty Shades of Grey, probably the best Dakota Johnson showcase we’ve ever gotten (with all due respect to Cha Cha Real Smooth, which I loved). Celine Song, the 36-year-old director of 2023’s Korean/English romance Past Lives (nominated for best picture and best original screenplay Oscars) seems to have found a particularly effective niche in her past two films. It’s a niche that goes something like “what if rom-com, but real?”
It’s easy to imagine The Materialists as a traditional rom-com and/or beach-read premise. Johnson plays Lucy, a cynical New York matchmaker who has essentially figured out how to turn human attraction into actuarial tables or a stock scheme. Men want physical attractiveness, youth, intelligence, compatibility. Women want financial stability, height, physical attractiveness, intelligence, compatibility. Lucy deals with all manner of delusional clients, from entitled women who seem to get more choosy as their child-bearing years dwindle, to delusional men who ask for someone who shares their love of old Woody Allen films but won’t date anyone older than 26.
When she’s pitching potential clients, Lucy says things like “people aren’t just looking for a good first date, they’re looking for a nursing home partner, a grave buddy.” In her more honest moments, when she’s describing her job, she says she feels like an insurance actuary, or a mortician. It’s all measuring, quantifying, monetizing.
It almost goes without saying that countless rom-coms have been built on the foundation of an icy career woman or ruthless businessman meeting a kooky free-spirit who rocks their worldview to the core. “My whole life was in there!” they shout when someone inevitably knocks their iPhone into a vase or the ocean. “Oh, sweetie, no,” the free spirit says, stroking their cheek. “Your life is out here.” (See also: Shhh, I’m listening to my block.)
The beauty of The Materialists is that it’s somehow both exactly that and not that at all. Song has a knack for stripping away the layers of artifice that normally accompany such stories. Insodoing, she doesn’t so much repudiate the genre or defy the usual tropes as reaffirm them, finding their heart and reminding you why they exist in the first place.