Jane Austen Did It Better

The most vulnerable scene in Materialists, Director Celine Song’s sophomore feature, isn’t a love scene. It’s not when John, a down-on-his-luck artist played by Chris Evans, repeatedly declares his love for Lucy, his ex and matchmaker for New York’s elite played by Dakota Johnson. Nor is it during one of the many dates Harry, Pedro Pascal’s character and a successful private equity man, takes Lucy on.

It’s a scene in the kitchen where Harry tells Lucy he had surgery to make himself six inches taller. He has opened up to her. The pair has revealed the cosmetic “investments” they’ve made to their bodies with the hopes of finding love, Harry by detailing his surgery and Lucy by gesturing to her nose and breasts. Harry is vulnerable, crouching at one point so Lucy can see how short he used to be, turning away from her when he admits he’s afraid he doesn’t know if he’s capable of falling in love.

It’s the one moment in the film where I believe they could end up together. It’s also the scene where she ends their relationship. It’s become too transactional. “Isn’t marriage a business deal?” Harry asks. “Yes, it is,” she responds, “but love has to be on the table.”

You get it. She returns to John, deciding that love, true love, is more important than money. It’s a familiar storyline. Films from Titanic to The Notebook have featured women falling for broke men. But instead of rejoicing in this outcome, audiences felt disappointed. Many a TikToker called the film “broke boyfriend propaganda,” crying “justice for Pedro Pascal.” Filmgoers didn’t want Lucy to choose love over money. They didn’t want her to choose money over love either. They wanted her to fall in love—with a man who happened to be rich. 

They wanted the ending that befalls so many of Jane Austen’s heroines. Song has called on Austen many times in the film’s press tour. “It goes back to Jane Austen, right?” she told Harpers Bazaar of working on a rom com. “Jane Austen was the first to do it. I just feel so lucky and honored to be part of a lineage of a very long-lasting and resonating genre.” To The Nightly, she said, “The question is how can a romantic film, and I believe my movie is so romantic, talk about finance so much? … My answer would always be, well, that’s true in every Jane Austen book.”

But part of why it’s difficult to take the film’s critique of class and matrimony seriously is that unlike Austen—who blames her heroines’ financial precarity squarely on patriarchal structures—Song is reluctant to engage with the difficult economic realities that might make a modern day New York single marry for money over love. Lucy isn’t worried that she and John will be unable to make rent; she’s worried they won’t be able to go to upscale restaurants. John’s lack of wealth not only doesn’t threaten Lucy’s ability to survive in the city, it barely even threatens her lifestyle. 

When John and Lucy were first together, they were both struggling actors, but by the time we meet them in the film, Lucy has found professional success. She’s a matchmaker with nine weddings to her name at a high-end firm for wealthy individuals. She lives—somewhat implausibly—by herself in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It’s on the smaller side—a nod to the kind of space she could afford in a wealthy neighborhood—but comfortable, and crucially not a studio. It feels both newer and less cramped than John’s apartment. It’s difficult to earnestly believe Lucy when she says “I’ll be living in your shitty bedroom,” because why wouldn’t they just move into her apartment?  

Economic precarity—especially in New York City—is real. According to Zillow, rent in the city averages nearly $3,800 per month; it’s fair for people to consider the economics of their romantic matches. Materialists understands this reality, but it doesn’t go so far as to critique it. Other than a passing remark about her debt, Lucy seems to be thriving. While it’s questionable that she can afford her lifestyle on her self-proclaimed salary of $80k before taxes, the film doesn’t really show her struggling. Instead—as with Carrie Bradshw, Monica Geller, and many a New York heroine—we’re meant to suspend our disbelief. Of course she can afford the gorgeous apartment and high end clothes on a modest salary. Don’t do the math. 

Since John’s economic precarity doesn’t seem like a true threat to Lucy’s livelihood, viewers are left to assume that the real reason they can’t be together is that she doesn’t want to be the financial breadwinner in her relationship. Throughout the film, she’s ambivalent toward her job: She compares it to working at the morgue or an insurance company, repeatedly tries to quit, and doesn’t care about being promoted. 

Lucy aspires to what many have called a “soft-girl” life. Defined by TikToker museumofmia as a desire to “live my life slowly and lay in a bed of moss with my lover,” soft girls aren’t interested in the kind of corporate, girl boss feminism that dominated the culture in the mid-2000s and the 2010s. They want to engage in self care, meditating and developing elaborate skin care routines. (It’s worth noting: most of these influencers aren’t actually opting out of paid work; they’re content creators). 

While the film doesn’t explicitly identify Lucy as a soft girl, her life is aligned with the movement both aesthetically and in her actions. She’s not trying to climb the corporate ladder, but she relishes in luxury—designer clothes, posh apartments, fine dining. It’s a far cry from the romantic comedy heroines of the 90s and early 2000s, who had professional as well as romantic aspirations. Bridget Jones was trying to build a media career while searching for her Mr. Right; Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days tried to leverage her dating column into a career as a serious journalist; You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen Kelly wants her indie bookshop to succeed.  

In some ways, the soft girl is a rejection of the demands that women “have it all,” an ethos those rom coms of the 90s and aughts espoused. But it is also just one step away from the trad wife. The self-professed goal of many women who identify themselves as soft girls is to become stay-at-home wives, mothers, and girlfriends. 

You could read Lucy’s resistance to hustle culture as a criticism of the same capitalist structures that encourage people to view dating as an investment, something the film purports to critique. This seems to be how Song wants us to view it; she has said, in a now viral TikTok from Refinery29, that “so much of feminism has been about [being] anti-corporate and anti-capitalist. And, of course, it was always at the forefront of fighting classism.” But while Song is right that some strains of feminism have fought classism, it’s also important to remember that its objective has been to make sure women can live independently of men both financially and politically. 

Lucy, by contrast, would rather be dependent on a man than financially independent in her own right. On her dates with Harry, she feels valuable because he treats her to dinner. When she stays over at his apartment, he makes her breakfast while fielding work calls as she lounges in his shirt. Why would she work, the film seems to ask, when her wealthy boyfriend can just go to the office and provide for her? Though Lucy ultimately makes a different choice in choosing John,  it’s hard to read this as a rejection of soft girl culture when by the end, she’s still trying to quit her job without having a new position lined up or a clear plan for how she will support herself and John. She doesn’t need to be careerist, but it would be more feminist and more anticapitalist for her to acknowledge she needs to work, even if it’s not personally fulfilling.  

This messaging is further reinforced through the film’s portrayal of Lucy’s clients: careerist women who have failed to find love. The film features two montages of clients detailing what they’re looking for in a match: one of men and one of women. Each features absurd requests. One of the men only wants to see women who are 27. A woman is looking for a church-going, conservative lesbian…in New York City. Lucy never loses it on her male clients. She smiles politely while they make their requests—no matter how offensive or outlandish. But to the women, she responds with disdain: “That doesn’t mean you’re due to get one [a husband],” or “you’re not a catch.” These consultations come after a moment when Lucy is having a crisis in her career. Sophie S., a long-term client of hers, has been assaulted by a man who Lucy set her up with, something the film never fully reckons with, and is glossed over as a mere plot point.

It’s telling that women are the only clients Lucy tells off. Men are entitled to get what they want, while the best a professionally-successful woman—the only kind who can afford Lucy’s services—can hope for is to settle for someone who is nice enough, a little short, and won’t physically harm her. In some ways, that’s a reflection of the culture we live in. Men continually ascend into positions of power even when they have harmed women, whereas women’s careers get sidelined by marriage and motherhood. But if the film aims to be critical of the culture that produces these outcomes, the intent is undermined by its apparent judgement of the decisions women make when it comes to both love and money. 

Lucy, and her choices, act as a foil to those of Sophie and her other clients, leaving us with a portrayal of two possible paths for a woman’s romantic life. Lucy’s path—a disinterest in work beyond the luxury it gives her access to—leads her to a loving marriage. Sophie’s path—pursuing her career over romantic prospects, the film implies—has left her unable to find love. Sophie made the wrong choice, by Materialists’s logic, and she can only correct her mistake by working with Lucy to find love, even though the matchmaking company put her in a dangerous situation.  

The message isn’t an entirely unprecedented one. Women in rom coms have long been expected to place their love lives above their own financial stability and careers. Andie in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days chooses to stay with Ben instead of leaving New York for a job that would let her do some serious reporting. Joe in You’ve Got Mail shuts down Kathleen’s store. When women are professionally successful (think: Margaret Tate in The Proposal), they’re portrayed as shrew-like and in need of a man to soften and feminize them. Yes, these heroines tried to have it all, but if it came down to a choice between love and career, they chose love. 

Given that Song was so inspired by Jane Austen, it’s worth asking how Austen was able to skewer classism and the patriarchy while empowering her female characters, and why Materialists falls short in comparison.

Consider Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s most popular novel and the text Materialists is most clearly referencing. In Pride and Prejudice, we see a variety of marriages take place: Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to Mr. Collins, Lydia Bennet’s to Mr. Wickham, Jane’s to Mr. Bingley, and, of course, Lizzy’s to Mr. Darcy. Jane and Lizzy’s matches are driven by love, but Lydia gets married to avoid scandal. Charlotte marries for economic security. For the most part, Austen isn’t judgemental about these options, nor does she shirk away from the real financial precarity the Bennet sisters will face if they fail to marry. The book is straightforward about their options: losing the house and depending on relatives or becoming governesses for other families, training future girls to marry. Mrs. Bennet’s histrionics and desperate attempts at matchmaking are played for laughs, but they underscore a real fear for her daughter’s well being. There’s no way for them to live well without a rich husband. Lucy doesn’t face that same kind of precarity. Without it, the movie lacks the necessary skewering of societal structures and again leaves it feeling more critical of women’s choices than of the society that puts them in such positions to begin with.

The appeal of a film like Materialists at this current cultural moment is clear—and it’s likely to persist. We’re a generation of voyeurs eagerly reading Refinery29’s Money Diaries. We skyrocketed Tiktoker girl_on_couch’s declaration, “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes,” into an inescapably viral song. Marriage is increasingly an institution only for the wealthy: only 39 percent of working class adults were married in 2017, compared to 51 percent in 1990, according to reporting from The Guardian, and that gap continues to widen.  Social media algorithms are pushing content aimed at getting young women to embrace more traditional gender roles. Materialists’s critique of the classist and patriarchal systems that got us here may fall short, but it’s starting a conversation that’s badly needed. 

To succeed at making its desired statement on the capitalist machinations that make people treat finding a spouse like making an investment, the film would need to spend less time luxuriating in the high-end dinners and fine fabrics of Harry’s lifestyle and more time dealing with the economic realities of living in New York that could be, understandably, making Lucy anxious about money. Likewise, it would need to move away from casting dispersions on Lucy’s female clients, for putting their careers first. We deserve a film that is honest about what it costs to live—and what that’s costing us when it comes to love.