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.
