Sometimes, movie stars are a lot like onions. Before you accuse me of pilfering my metaphors from Shrek, I should say I don’t mean that they have layers – though plenty do, of course – but onions have a way of just going with everything. Some actors, the Florence Pughs and Jesse Plemonses of the world, share exactly this quality: you can put them anywhere – a comedy or a romance, a Guy Ritchie thriller or A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and they’ll never offend the palate. They just always go. Dakota Johnson is not one of these actors.
Johnson, the 35-year-old daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, is in the middle of one of the more curious movie careers in recent memory. She was propelled to fame playing sexual submissive Anastasia Steele in 2015’s glossy, schlocky erotic drama Fifty Shades of Grey – a box-office behemoth that was nevertheless widely considered abject pap. Johnson gave an admirable performance, but still ended up shouldering most of the scorn. In the years since, there have been promising highs (her two collaborations with director Luca Guadagnino, Suspiria and A Bigger Splash) and guileless lows (last year’s Madame Web, a deliriously bad attempt to launch Johnson as a soothsaying Marvel hero). Materialists, out in cinemas this week, slinks bashfully into the latter category.
The problem is not that Johnson is a bad actor, but that she is a specific one, with a very particular set of skills. She has an unusual way of talking – soft-spoken but enunciative, as if perpetually recording ASMR content. On screen, with the wrong script, it can just seem like monotony. If you watch footage of Johnson out of character, it becomes obvious that this voice conveys a dry, caustic humour, like a martini cut with paint thinner. There’s a playful prickliness to Johnson’s out-of-character persona – seen, most famously, when she called out Ellen DeGeneres live on air over a non-existent party invite. But it’s seemingly one that Hollywood has no interest in exploring.
On paper, Materialists would seem like exactly the sort of project Johnson should be signing up for. The director, Celine Song, had been anointed one of the industry’s buzziest young filmmakers after her Oscar-nominated 2023 debut Past Lives. Materialists, her second film, was to be a crowd-pleaser with heft: an elevated romantic drama built around Johnson’s character, flanked by two credible movie stars in Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. Johnson plays an elite romantic matchmaker for wealthy singles, in what ought to be a meaty, complicated role: she’s avaricious, she’s combative, and she’s unlovable. Or at least, she tells you that she is all these things.
Sadly, Materialists is let down by, well, the material. It’s tonally messy, thematically ham-fisted and it lapses occasionally into outright ludicrousness – leaving Johnson in the lurch, dramatically speaking. She’s not bad, per se, but struggles to find either depth or levity in what is a thuddingly literal script. You can see her straining to pitch the appropriate intensity for lines such as: “I don’t want to hate you because you’re poor, but right now I do, and it makes me hate myself”.
It would be unfair to draw too many parallels between Materialists and Madame Web – a superhero film so shoddily conceived and disastrously executed that it crossed the Rubicon into high camp – but this is the second summer in a row that Johnson’s big headline film has been a misfire. She has never been one of those actors who can escape unscathed from a bad movie: she has won three Golden Raspberry awards, including one for Madame Web. (The Razzies, to be clear, are critically dubious and morally problematic, but they do sometimes serve as a good indication of broad public opinion.) Johnson has, for what it’s worth, spent much of the past year poking fun at her abortive franchise-starter at every opportunity.
Perversely, in the weeks leading up Materialists’ US release, Johnson actually provided us crystal-clear evidence of her merit as a screen presence. Her episode of Hot Ones, the YouTube show in which celebrities answer questions while ingesting a progression of increasingly spicy chicken wings, was one of the best, and funniest, in the series’ run. A giddy and irreverent paired interview with Pascal for Vogue spawned several viral clips, as did her interview under a lie detector for Vanity Fair. (Johnson has admitted in the past that she routinely lies to the press – and gets away with it.) Over a run of TV appearances and video interviews like these, Johnson was given countless opportunities to be droll, eccentric, and inscrutable. When will she finally be asked to play a character like that?
It’s not like she’s alone in this predicament. The film industry is packed with talented actors who are not asked to play to their personalities. Stars such as Keke Palmer, or even Jennifer Lawrence, have been starved of vehicles that showcase the sort of eminent comic magnetism at which they excel in interviews. But few are as inexplicably misused as Johnson, whose peculiar qualities are so glowing and her weaknesses so transparent.
It’s significant, perhaps, that Johnson sticks exclusively to movies – her only major TV role being a stint as a regular on the short-lived sitcom Ben and Kate, from 2012 to 2013. Where many actors have turned to television to provide them with the sort of roles they can’t find on film, Johnson has resolutely clung to the big screen. It’s worked, in a way: nobody thinks of her as a “streaming star” – that glamourless and ever-expanding sub-category of modern actor. She’s a movie star, through and through; now she just needs the movies to back it up.
‘Materialists’ is in cinemas from Wednesday 13 August
