The Best Joke in ‘Materialists’ Is Also Its Darkest
Warning: This post reveals a pivotal Materialists plot point.
Whenever a novelty enters our lives, there has to have been a moment when someone made the first-ever joke about it. Someone was the first person to order a friend to MoveOn.org; someone was first to the problem of a VCR’s clock perpetually blinking 12:00; someone made the first observation about bad airline food or the hassle of remembering speakeasy passwords or what to do when your wig powder guy goes out of town on vacation. So it is with new surgeries — with the slightly frivolous ones, anyway: Someone must have made the first joke about a spinal fusion, but I doubt the floodgates opened up behind them. Turkish hair transplants, Brazilian butt lifts, regular old American boob jobs, nose jobs and facelifts — we’ve all heard jokes about those.
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There’s another cosmetic procedure, though, that hasn’t quite hit the mainstream yet, and Materialists might just feature the first joke about it. It’s definitely the first one I’ve ever seen.
Materialists is about Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who works as a matchmaker in New York. The men she works with want the women to be beautiful, accomplished and young. The women want the men to be handsome, but that’s usually just a “nice-to-have” if they satisfy the “non-negotiables”: earning six-figure incomes and being tall. At the wedding for a couple she matched, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the groom’s best man and brother. Though he switches place cards so that he can get close to Lucy — having eavesdropped on her pitch to a group of prospective clients, in which she says the happy ending she seeks for them is that they each find their “grave buddy” — Lucy doesn’t bother trying to flirt with Harry; to her, he’s a prospect, for whom she can find someone much more suitable. But when it eventually becomes clear that she’s not going to close him, Lucy relents, letting him take her home to his $12 million apartment.
As you would expect in a film from the writer-director of Past Lives, there is another guy: John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor Lucy dated for years, and with whom she reconnects at the same wedding where she meets Harry — because John is there working as a cater-waiter. Lucy and John stay in casual touch until she experiences a crushing professional crisis and she wants to talk about it with him — not with Harry, lest she mar the perfectly polished image she presents to him. But on the eve of a planned trip with Harry, Lucy notices — not for the first time — faded scars on Harry’s legs that, when she wakes him up feeling them, he irritably covers with a sheet before storming out to the kitchen. Suddenly we remember the conversation between Lucy and her colleague Daisy (Dasha Nekrasova) about a new surgery that can add up to six inches of height to anyone willing to have their legs professionally broken and rebuilt.
Once Harry gets over his initial pique that Lucy has uncovered a secret he was trying hard to keep, they have what may be their very first honest conversation. We’ve seen Lucy describing her work as “math”; a wavering bride is convinced to go through with her wedding when Lucy determines that her groom makes her feel “valuable”; a disappointed client refuses to let Lucy treat her as though she’s “worthless.” So it is for Lucy and Harry in this unvarnished late-night conversation, laden with monetary terms. “I made an investment,” he tells her. (She says she understands him, gesturing to her breasts. “I figured,” he admits.) Harry says he and his brother, who had the procedure with him, agree that it was “definitely worth it”: “You’re just WORTH more” in the dating marketplace. But, Lucy tells him, they’re not in love, and no amount of money can fix it.
“Where’s the joke?”
Well, it’s not the false equivalency: Harry, at his previously undesirable height, was never as disadvantaged as the New York women who didn’t do the math, focused on their careers, and are now scrambling to find husbands when men their age want women with 10 more fertile years ahead of them. Harry may have, as Lucy and Daisy estimated, doubled his “value” by gaining height, but his $500K salary still would have made him a hot prospect at half his current valuation.
“Is the joke the idea that Lucy was an undateable troll before her very tasteful boob job?”
It’s not that either. It’s the moment Lucy asks Harry how much taller he is now than he used to be. He tells her he added six inches, and then, slowly, lowers his torso behind the kitchen island to approximate where his head was back when he was a mere 5-foot-6.
Harry has been keeping his image perfectly polished for Lucy, too; this is the first funny thing we’ve seen him do, the first indication that there’s more to his personality than being good at getting restaurant checks. If Harry had been vulnerable sooner, maybe Lucy would have felt safe to confide in him instead of John. Maybe they could have gotten to know each other well enough to fall in love. Maybe they could have been each other’s grave buddies. Alas.
Harry’s happy ending is signing with Lucy’s matchmaking agency, undoubtedly dazzling the female clientele with his “unicorn” status. None of them better find out he’s actually only 5-foot-10.
