This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Material Girl
Plot Overview
At 29 Consummate NYC matchmaker Lucy (Dakota
Johnson) has her successes and her failures. She herself is a
bachelorette out of the game until she meets a couple men at
the wedding reception of one of her company's clients. Then she has
some sorting out to do, much along the lines of a Limbaugh monologue:
A woman walks into a bar, or library, or art gallery. or museum, or church, or a pro-choice march, or an animal liberation protest—whatever least offends you. She encounters two equally attractive men and strikes up a conversation with each of them separately. The beginnings of the mating dance, so to speak. As always happens in these situations, she gets around do asking them what they want out of life, what things are important to them. This is because she is interested in what a future with either of them would be like. (As my father said: “Women always marry up.”) One of these Romeos tells her that he has the ambition to be the best he can be at whatever he does and to be as educated as he can be. He describes the material things he hopes to earn (if they live in New York, it is imperative that he mention at this point that he intends to have a summer house on the island), that he hopes for a family, a nice home, and a prosperous future. All the normal, usual stuff.The other Don Juan, however, presents different options. He figures she is a liberated woman of the eighties and nineties and he wants to get on base now. He launches into a sensitive and magnificent description of how he loves children and is tired of the rat race and all the cutthroat competition “out there.” Too much insincerity, he tells her. Too many phonies—you can't trust anyone anymore. Just a bunch of hedonists who want some fast action, then move on. None of that for him, he assures her. (194)
Bachelor 1 she meets is Harry (Pedro
Pascal) the extremely wealthy brother of the groom. In the
matchmaking business he'd be known as a “unicorn”
as he checks off all of the boxes—wealthy, companionable, of
good upbringing, politically in, etc.—a ten out of ten in
every category. But he's not interested in their service, only in
seeing Lucy, which they begin to do.
Bachelor 2 is a caterer
at the party, her ex-boyfriend of five years whom she loves and he
her, but she had to let him go for his limited prospects as an
undiscovered actor. Their chance interaction raises the
possibility of them getting back together again, but that would
mean she give up her monetary goals. Here's the advice of author
Claude Tillier:
If a man were [only] free to choose a companion for himself; but the necessities of social life always force us to marry in a ridiculous way contrary to our inclinations. Man marries a dowry, woman a profession. Then, after all the fine Sundays of their honeymoon, they return to the solitude of their household, only to see that they do not suit each other. One is stingy and the other extravagant; the wife is coquettish and the husband jealous; one loves like a tempest and the other like a gentle breeze; they would like to be a thousand miles apart, but they have to live in the iron circle within which they have confined themselves, and remain together usque ad vitam aeternam. (30)
Ideology
In her perambulations Lucy
finds herself in front of a building headed as Discover Our
Roots and featuring Early Humans. She decides to
investigate the first marriage. The movie opens with this scene: A
cave girl is awakened by a sweet aroma and exits the cave to find
a caveman a calling, evidently approved by her cave parents
who remain sleeping. He is holding an enormous bouquet of fresh
flowers. They smile at each other a lot. He plucks a posy and
fashions its stem into a ring and slips it onto her ring finger.
The smiles and fragrance represent loving care and the ring being
a circle means always. They are married, the first two. Before that,
procreation was accomplished with a club and some force. Lucy's company
occasionally runs into that on dates they set up. The above could provide
an anthropologist rich grist for the mill. Consulting scientist
Marvin Harris on What is Marriage? we read:
One of the problems with the proposition that the nuclear family is the basic building block of all domestic groups is that it rests on the assumption that widely different forms of matings can be called “marriage.” Yet in order to cover the extraordinary diversity of mating behavior characteristic of the human species, the definition of marriage has to be made so broad as to be confusing. —Since the term marriage is too useful to drop altogether, a more narrow definition seems appropriate: Marriage denotes the behavior, sentiments, and rules concerned with coresident heterosexual mating and reproduction in domestic contexts.
To avoid offending people by using marriage exclusively for coresident heterosexual domestic mates, a simple expedient is available. Let such other relationships be designated as “noncoresident marriages”, “man-man marriages”, “woman-woman marriages,” or by any other appropriate specific nomenclature. It is clear that these matings have different ecological, demographic, economic, and ideological implications, so nothing is to be gained by arguing about whether they are “real” marriages. (317–18)
A second scene has cave husband
returning from wherever he's been but he's still hanging
around. He caresses her swollen belly; she is with child making her
conclusively female. He has a beard showing he's male. This
marriage is therefore hetero and they share a cave, so the
marriage is fundamental. All the boxes do check: they are of the
same political persuasion, village communal; same
socioeconomic class, hunter/gatherers; same upbringing, in a
cave; speak the same native tongue, grunts. We think they can make
it. Maybe they started something.
In the movie Lucy and one of her
guys take a drive an hour out of the city where they crash a woke
wedding reception but then have to return to shoo away a client's
stalker when the police won't respond. Weddings have become gala
events enough to lure any random god in the neighborhood, and
people may turn to religion as a last resort. So we get witnesses
and religion involved in marriage, too.
There's a last scene set in a New York clearinghouse distributing marriage licenses to many diverse couples. There's even a homo couple up for a same-sex marriage, not the fundamental one that interests us. Lucy and her selection exit the door behind the cave couple doppelgängers. If there's anything to be learned from the alpha marriage, it might be as delineated by anthropologist Desmond Morris known for his popular book The Naked Ape on human evolution. He writes of human sexual relations: (247)
The [sexual] preliminaries provide time for careful judgments to be made, judgments that may be hard to form once the massive, shared emotional impact of double orgasm has been experienced. This powerful moment can act as such a tight ‘bonder’ that it may well tie together two people quite unsuited to each other, if they have not spent sufficient time exploring each other's personalities during the sexual preliminaries. (247)
Lucy still
had a tough decision to make, which would not have been helped by
sleeping with the guy(s) before making it. The first married couple
waited, and for what it's worth religion concurs (1Cor. 7:2) “to avoid
fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman
have her own husband.”
Production Values
“” (2025) was
written and directed by Celine Song. It stars Dakota Johnson, Chris
Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters, and Marin Ireland. They were
a fine bunch of actors working well together. They dressed up for
their elegant surrounding contrasting with the warm furs of the
primitive humans.
MPA rated it R for language and brief sexual material. It had great cinematography, monologues and soundtrack. Runtime is 1 hour 56 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
The big city could stand
some missionaries; religion was not even part of match selection
criteria. Maybe nobody had any.
This one was good for getting us to empathize with its various characters. It kept us guessing until the end which way Lucy would go. It painted a realistic picture of the matchmaking business. It is a somewhat intelligent picture.
Movie Ratings
Action Factor: Weak action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good Date Movie. Suspense: A few suspenseful moments. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software, print.
Harris, Marvin. CULTURE, PEOPLE, NATURE: An Introduction to General Anthropology fifth edition. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988. Print.
Limbaugh, Rush. The Way Things Ought To Be. New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Print.
Morris, Desmond. Manwatching. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. Print.
Tillier, Claude. My Uncle Benjamin. Copyright 1941 by Coventry House. New York: Coventry House, 1941. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org