Reese Witherspoon Made a Better Version of This Movie in 2002

Heritage

Jun 19

Spoilers ahead for Materialists (2025) and Sweet Home Alabama (2002).

This weekend, I went to see a movie with some friends in the theater, because traditional media will not die on my watch. The movie we saw was Materialists, an ostensible romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. It is the sophomore effort from director Celine Song, whose first film, Past Lives, was critically acclaimed as a moving portrayal of love in retrospect. Materialists, presented as a vintage 90s/00s-style rom-com, features Johnson as Lucy, a cynical New York City matchmaker who sees romance in terms of lists and checked boxes (“five-foot-eleven, doctor, forty-eight, born wealthy, still wealthy…”), Pascal as Harry, the seemingly perfect prospect Lucy originally scopes for her clients before he insists upon dating her instead, and Evans as John, a penniless, aging aspiring actor and Lucy’s ex-boyfriend.

We meet Harry and John at the same time, at the wedding of one of Lucy’s clients. Harry is the groom’s brother. John is a cater-waiter. Harry is handsome, wealthy, and suave; his conversation with Lucy leaves her intrigued and curious. After dancing with Harry, Lucy leaves the wedding with John in his broken-down car, where we learn that the two broke up because of the strain of financial hardship in their five-year relationship, despite acknowledging that they were, in fact, in love. John is patient and caring; he listens to Lucy and notices the small changes in her affect in a way that only someone who has known another person a long time could. He is still poor. They obviously still love each other. The die is cast; what we have here is a triangle.

Lucy goes on to date Harry, who is, by all accounts, the perfect man. She even tells him to his face that he’s the sort of man that keeps her clients’ expectations sky-high: a “unicorn” man, the whole package. Harry takes Lucy to expensive restaurants, buys out a florist’s entire supply of peonies for her, affirms her when she shows signs of insecurity, attends John’s podunk play with her, and books a trip for the two of them to Iceland, her dream vacation destination. But when Lucy receives devastating news about one of her clients, she doesn’t pick up the phone to call Harry between chain-smoked cigarettes and half-empty bottles of Stella Artois, but John, who listens. I’ll stop recapping the movie here. You can probably guess who Lucy ends up with.

About a quarter of the way through, I started feeling like I’d seen this film before. And that’s because I have. My thoughts on Materialists can be summed up in the one-sentence review I left on Letterboxd, shown here:

For those unfamiliar with the 2002 Reese Witherspoon classic Sweet Home Alabama, the plot is virtually identical to Materialists. Melanie, played by Witherspoon, bails on her backwoods hometown and her high-school-boyfriend-turned-husband and establishes a new life for herself as a fashion designer in (you guessed it) New York City. While there, she meets and falls in love with Patrick Dempsey’s Andrew, the blueblood son of the mayor (played to The Devil Wears Prada perfection by Candice Bergen). When Andrew proposes, Melanie heads home to Alabama get a quickie divorce from her scruffy estranged husband Jake (Josh Lucas). Coming home proves more complicated than Melanie anticipates, though, as she revisits the person she once was when she lived there, and loved Jake, who is still the person who has known and loved her longest.

Lucy and Melanie both come to realize that perfect on paper is not necessarily a recipe for love. Harry and Andrew are who Lucy and Melanie “should” want, but ultimately cannot really love. John and Jake, the men from their pasts, are the inconvenient and persistent loves that they return to in the end. It is, by all accounts, the same story with different settings. But here’s the thing: I love Sweet Home Alabama. I hated Materialists.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but I’ve come to realize that all these issues are just symptomatic of the core problem with Materialists: it is agonizingly self-serious. I was shocked, when I wrote my Letterboxd review, to scroll through a sea of positive feedback. People seem to really like this movie—but more than that, people seem obsessed with the director, Celine Song, and many of the reviews I read laud her as an auteur of sorts when it comes to modern romance films. The consensus seems to be that Celine Song has given us a scathing critique of modern dating culture, wherein romantic value is precalculated and people use these calculations to mask, skirt, and disguise their own insecurities. Materialists, say the reviewers, is a piece of serious cultural criticism Trojan-horsed into a rom-com package. It’s cerebral! It’s intellectual! It’s biting! Love can’t be reduced to math, you see! It’s illogical and inconvenient and our culture doesn’t value things that are illogical and inconvenient! Isn’t that groundbreaking?

Baloney. Materialists is a movie that says nothing new and says it badly. For the record, “love is not a checklist” was not a new concept in 2002 when Sweet Home Alabama was made. But at least Sweet Home Alabama didn’t try so hard to say something that it forgot to tell a halfway decent story. The dialogue in Materialists is often stilted and ham-fisted—Song wants to prove to the audience so badly that LUCY THINKS LOVE IS MATH that she makes Lucy say “love is math” about a million times in different ways. The character development in Materialists is vacuous at best—Song wants to the audience to believe that JOHN IS LUCY’S GREAT LOVE so much that she effectively makes John a Mary-Sue character with no flaws other than the fact that he’s poor. Harry is barely even a character at all; we learn basically nothing about him besides that he had surgical height extensions because remember LOVE IS MATH and women like men over 6'0”. The characters in Materialists live in an uncannily empty New York—apart from Lucy’s one client, her largely nameless coworkers and John’s interchangeable roommates (who provide the film’s three seconds of levity), there are no characters in this film besides the three leads, because their interactions are the vehicle for exposing the calculating emptiness of modern dating, which is THE BIG POINT of the movie. Unnatural writing and anemic characters make for a poor film, which is what Materialists ends up being for its insistence on beating a single theme into the ground as opposed to actually telling a story.

All this to say: this movie did not need to be a humorless critique to advance its main message. It did not need to be a mopey, self-loathing series of monologues dressed in a rom-com clothing. It could have, in fact, been a rom-com, and that likely would have made the film better across the board. But that movie already exists, and that move is Sweet Home Alabama. Sweet Home Alabama, unlike Materialists, has no single thematic axe to grind, which frees up the dialogue to be funnier, wider-ranging, and more organic. Both Andrew and Jake, the two love interests in Sweet Home Alabama, are fully embodied characters whose virtues and vices unfold over the course of the film, inviting the viewer to sympathize with both men in different ways. Sweet Home Alabama is packed with fascinating and hilarious side characters—Melanie’s Civil-War-reenacting father who, at one point, accidentally folds the mayor of New York City into a recliner, the high school friend who brings a breastfeeding baby to the bar, the semi-closeted gay man in the friend group who quietly weighs the costs of coming out in the deep South, the senile groundskeeper at the local estate who sets off cannon blasts every half hour—that don’t necessarily move the central romantic plotline forward, but make Melanie, Jake, and Andrew seem like real people who are making romantic decisions within a context, and not in a vacuum. I don’t want to argue that Sweet Home Alabama ought to have won Best Picture, but I am struck at how natural its writing feels and how real its characters seem in comparison to what we get in Materialists. Sweet Home Alabama has never been considered anything more than a garden-variety rom-com; if Materialists is the modern standard for a subversive masterpiece, then we have truly lost the plot.

In the end, Sweet Home Alabama says many of the same things Materialists tries to say, but Sweet Home Alabama doesn’t show the work. It never plays like it’s trying to say something. Instead, it just says it, with warmth and humor. It doesn’t need to subvert expectations or to play at “high art” to get there. Sweet Home Alabama is not afraid that any trace of fun will obscure its profoundly important message, as Materialists is. Instead, it tells a story that invites viewers to laugh, to cry, to sympathize, and, ultimately, to take from the movie what they will. Perhaps in an age of media illiteracy, viewers need a message spoon-fed to them, and if that’s true, perhaps the sea of good reviews for Materialists makes sense. As for me, I think movies were a lot more fun in 2002.