I’m going to be blunt and admit that I expected nothing from Fifty Shades of Grey (a shock, I know). That just so happens to be exactly what I got. Granted, to expect nothing from the adaptation of a “literary” work that grew from fanfic inspired by the Twilight series, is only sensible. Fans of the book despise the tag of “mommy porn” assigned to E.L. James’ Grey series, but it’s lack of even a semblance of developed characters or story beyond the hackneyed, dated fantasy of a damaged man changed by the love of an innocent woman, makes it totally dependent on the sex and S&M angle to give it life.
The sight of a woman in the theatre lotioning up her hands repeatedly before the film, did not give me hope that this would be more than an extended exercise in fighting drowsiness, an overlong tease with no money shot (seriously, two hours is a BIG stretch for this material). It’s the story of stunningly handsome, and wealthy, Christian Grey, a powerful young businessman who harbors a deep dark secret life, and his relationship with the virgin college student Anastasia Steele. The book, according to my sources, is simple, crude and explicit, and as one of my friends first said of the idea of a film adaptation “I don’t know how they’re going to make a film of this without it being straight-up porn.” Well, they didn’t-they trimmed down the sex and made naptime.
There are a lot of issues at play in the public and critical response to these books, in terms of whether they are anti-feminist by catering, for popularity’s sake, to patriarchal attitudes and the subjugation of women to figures posed for male pleasure; or if they are empowering because they allow for the expression of submissive female sexuality, and the freedom of women to indulge in their own sexual tastes by openly reading these books, without demonizing that position as detrimental to gender equality. I’m not sure what is empowering about a female character with no personality who just wants to cuddle, but lets a man do things to her she doesn’t seem to like much because he’s hot and seductive. Oh, but she’ll learn to like it? hmmmmm…
Exposing this issue further is the film’s deference to traditional standards of on-screen nudity so as not to upset the apple cart: we see all of Anastasia’s body, but Grey’s anatomy is a no-show. The news that there was no male full-frontal in this film caused quite a stir of anger in the online community, and ensured that I certainly wasn’t paying to see this for sure (thank the Lord I didn’t have to). There’s no really good reason for why Jamie Dornan gets to cover up as Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson has to bare all as Anastasia except that producers presumably didn’t want to upset men in the audience. Riiiight, because the sight of a penis is what would totally disrupt the comfort hetero men feel bringing their girlfriends/wives to this movie on Valentine’s Day, to get a glimpse of a much hotter guy and an interesting sex life they aren’t supplying.
The audience of college girls with their boyfriends, whom I had the woeful misfortune of sharing the theatre with, laughed out loud at the sight of Grey’s ass the one time it’s featured, as if they had never seen one before. The girls even audibly sighed and gasped when he took off his shirt or moved toward Anastasia with sexual intent, practically orgasming at the mere sight of his skin, right in front of their silent boyfriends who apparently don’t elicit those sounds outside the theatre.
Anastasia’s discomfort, and her entrancement by Grey’s beauty, is the one element that the college girls in the audience responded to most, even though they laughed knowingly at every coy reference (that I believe has to be intentionally humorous on the part of the director and actors) building to the revelation of BDSM in the story, a build-up that goes nowhere very slowly. Judging from the constant giggling, the prime audience for this hogwash must be people who can’t handle getting beneath the surface of any of this, any better than Anastasia could. To be fair, this is how things transpire in the first book in the trilogy. To be honest, I hope this does not become a film series too.
This adaptation is so palpably afraid of delving beneath the surface, that it breaks zero new ground and turns out a product composed entirely of foreplay and no climax. For a film about “letting go” it stayed limply within the bounds, and sadly that is exactly how it’s raking in big bucks on the screen, just as it did on the page. As of this review the film has pulled in $30 million U.S. box office, and is sure to take in a bit more before bad word of mouth kills the hard-on. Of course part of playing it safe is being comfortable luxuriating in the undressing of Anastasia. But the camera suddenly shies away from the action in every sex scene, once we’ve seen all of her body.
Why bother making the film just to hem and haw and beat around the bush of it’s raison d’etre? If anything, the sex scenes in this movie should have been so good everyone was squirming in their seats. But it trots out dusty old techniques and lots of heavy breathing instead of something new. It’s not even filming “freaky” sex this way either. The mere suggestion of BDSM gives the whole project that dirty angle that requires more visual diffusion of the material in a movie made for middle-of-the-road mainstream audiences.
This suggestion causes even a talented director like Sam Taylor-Johnson to film boring sex with the “alternative lifestyle” twist. The best example is when the camera pans up in one scene after a few missionary thrusts to a painting of ocean waves, then to a reflection in the mirror on the ceiling. The characters are reduced to fragmented bodies in close-ups (the way they frequently are in Hollywood sex scenes) before cutting to post-coital bliss. Of course if this was 30 years ago, at least the cigarette wouldn’t be missing to complete the tired cliché. Compare this to the sex scene between Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean in Making Love from 1984.
Fifty Shades of Grey reminded me of how sex is still largely filmed when Hollywood does romantic gay characters, but doesn’t want to challenge the delicate constitutions of a mainstream audience with “edgy” “modern” sexual content: men framed at the waist from pubic hair up, a distracting angle (which stands out among the fastidious Wes Anderson framing of everything else here), or various bric-a-brac cluttering the frame. The film is all talk and no action, and thus reliant on the concept and the fifty shades of bullshit story, which is a problem.
The film desires the notoriety/attention guaranteed by it’s flaccid exploration of S&M to titillate a sexual-dullard audience looking to spice up their vanilla. But it only goes as far as someone (not really into it) does when they visit a sex-shop for the first time. While it’s a nice thought that the popularity of this book and film might enable people to be more open to new ideas and explore new things that previously frightened them, this film doesn’t demystify the subculture or make it palatable for us, because it capitalizes on the fear of prurient interest and projects old stereotypes.
Part of the problem is the central misconception of BDSM. In this film, it’s a simplistic tool to help boring people in the audience feel less boring, exploited to prop up stale material and frequently contradicting other elements of the story. Throughout you see Christian Grey engage in inconsistent and questionable behavior that no sexual partner should condone. For instance, he is so disturbed when Anastasia drunk-dials him that he instantly rides in on his millionaire chariot to save her from herself.
Yet when they have sex or attempt to “play” he’s feeding her alcohol (at one point like a mama bird feeds babies, as Anastasia’s hands are tied above her), compromising her consent, which he claims to care deeply about since they spend so much time hashing out the explicit details of the dominant-submissive contract she is supposed to sign to accept Grey’s demands and win the prize of…him. Since we never get to know him, that’s not enough of a prize, no matter how damn sexy Jamie Dornan is. Christian’s self-professed “fifty shades of fucked up” doesn’t encourage us to cheer for this relationship.
The obvious clues leading up to the revelation of Grey’s dominant bondage and discipline leanings probably worked well enough as schlock on the page with one free hand, but it doesn’t play on-screen. It just felt like late-night cable porn with astronomic production values. Since the characters are little more than animated blow-up dolls to begin with, the film never establishes any genuine chemistry. Grey is into abusing women (“I don’t make love. I fuck, hard.”) because of some abusive experience in childhood, suggesting that those interested in BDSM are psychologically twisted by trauma or unstable/broken people, despite research that suggests the opposite.
For a girl that lives in Portland, purportedly America’s kinkiest city, Anastasia is awfully naive in so many ways that it’s impossible to feign concern in her exploits. “I’ve got GPS and 4.0, I think I can find my way” she says early on, but her character consists of contemplatively sticking long pencils with Grey’s name on them on her lips, then never making up her mind on what she wants, like the film itself. She wants him, but she doesn’t want to be his slave, then she submits and likes it, then she doesn’t like it once it becomes serious, then she leaves, then she demands change, then she submits again. The kicker is that she freaks out when he gives her a “real” taste of what he likes: the grand payoff to all this foreplay is a spanking with a belt. With all the tools in his playroom, she freaks out the most over that?
How about that “don’t touch me” rule he has? You’re not worried about that over the long haul? Or the 15 women who came and went before you? And if she was using the MacBook he gave her to do research on this lifestyle, why was she still shocked about what he wanted? Didn’t she have a contract that stated what he wanted all along? As a 4.0 student, you’d think she’d have learned something by the end of the film. You think she has when she runs away again, as I did once the film was over. Only I’m not planning on coming back, and since there are two more books, we know she is. Sorry about it.
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