Materialists review – Dakota Johnson torn between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans in charming romcom

Johnson plays a matchmaker who has to choose between wealthy new suitor Pascal and broke ex Evans, but the outcome feels a little undramaticSay you are a single woman in New York and you are, in the words of the song, torn between two lovers: two handsome, intelligent, nice guys – one very poor and one very rich. All things being equal, who do you go for? The answer in real life is very different, in fact diametrically opposed, to the answer in a film. Few movie heroines have the candour of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who admitted to falling in love with Mr Darcy on seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.But this is the choice, which never quite ascends to the state of a dilemma, in this charming and watchable – yet for me somehow anticlimactic – romantic comedy-drama from South Korean-Canadian film-maker Celine Song: a love-triangle confection to follow the much realer, truer love triangle of Song’s much acclaimed debut Past Lives. When the decision is made, the final act has an almost morosely elegiac mood, as it must, as various speeches and set pieces reconcile its rather trudgingly earnest direction of travel with the witty, savvy materialism of the movie’s premise. Continue reading...

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