I'd like to meet just one person—male or female—who found the original FIFTY SHADES OF GREY novel genuinely inspirational as a means of getting worked up and ready for a whole new level of kink in their sad, empty lives. Because I bet even that one person would find the film adaptation of the E.L. James novel (with two more films on the way!) a total snooze as anything resembling a guide to BDSM practices. Of course, I'm not being exactly fair, because, in fact, FIFTY SHADES OF GREY isn't meant to be an instruction manual to whipping, tying up, blindfolds, spanking, or buying a woman gifts until you've effectively paid her to sleep with you. It's actually a profile of a man who was sexually abused as a kid by a female family friend and has spent his whole life since trying to make women pay for his pain...but try fitting that on a poster.
Only her second feature, director Sam Taylor-Johnson (NOWHERE BOY), working from a script by Kelly Marcel, actually starts out the film on solid, curious ground. Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a near-graduating college student who has to fill in for her roommate Kate (Eloise Mumford) to do an interview with publishing tycoon Christian Grey (Jamie Dorman) in his Seattle office for their college paper. Armed with Kate's questions and not a lot of interviewing experience, Anastasia stumbles into Grey's office wide eyed, starstruck and bit flustered by Grey's commanding, handsome presence... and that's with his clothes on.
The real shock of FIFTY SHADES OF GREY is the sense of humor it starts out with. Grey is fairly aware of the power he has over women, and he knows exactly how to bring Ana into his clutches. His intentions aren't exactly evil, but he does have an under-lock-and-key playroom equipped with all the latest devices of sexual torment. But even that unveiling is done with a degree of levity that had me hoping for the best in the first hour or so. Grey never gets tired of telling Ana (and us) that he's no a romance kind of guy, but he's in not short supply of romantic gestures—helicopter flights, showing up unexpectedly, fancy dinners and charm for days. The dude even holds her hair back while she blows chunks after drinking too much at a club.
But when he begins to lay out his particular wants and needs, it's clear that this fairly naive young woman (turns out she's still a virgin who has had no sexual contact of any kind ever) wants to be open minded and is so turned on by Grey that she's willing to try his ropes and handcuffs on for size. If for no other reason, I appreciated FIFTY SHADES OF GREY for beginning the conversation on non-traditional sex; as misguided as things get in the story, at least the characters talk things out. Of course, Grey also asks Ana to sign a non-disclosure agreement about their relationship and, later in one of the film's most humorous scenes, a contract spelling out in detail what she will and won't do. Their meeting to hash out the details of the contract is hilarious, and I believe deliberately so.
There's an extraordinary amount of backstory about our two leads that seems wholly unnecessary. Details about parents (Jennifer Ehle plays her mom; Marcia Gay Harden and Luke Grimes play his parents) are ushered forth with no real connection to the main events of the film. There's a whole sequence where Ana goes to visit her mother in Georgia that serves no purpose other to for Grey to get emotional enough about her being gone to follow her there.
Weirdly enough, the film loses a lot of its focus when the kinky sex kicks in, in large part because of the way the kink is shot—lots of dopey slow-motion shots of Grey using a riding crop on Ana or strapping her down to his sex bed. Make no mistake, Johnson and Dornan are near-perfect naked human specimens, but once you get over seeing pretty much everything they have to offer, what's left is a lot of trite, softcore lighting, pulsating music, and I want to believe a wind machine was in play at some point. If you're going to teach us something, teach us. Show it to us the way Christian Grey sees it—all about causing another pain and dominating them for his pleasure. We've seen the romance; now show us why the book is notorious.
The film is actually good at not delivering on promises made by and other creepy things about Grey. He tells her she essentially has to be at his sexual beck and call, except that doesn't really happen. He says he doesn't like to sleep next to anyone, but he does it a lot with Ana. He says no hardcore sex without the contract, but that happens too. But an equally taxing problem is Ana's reactions to Grey, which range from a whole lot of lip biting to more lip biting accompanied by gasps that might be shock or maybe getting turned on.
Except for one closing encounter between the couple in which she demands he gives her the worst he's got, none of their sex is particularly daring or unspeakable. Far more daring is Ana's constant challenging of his sexual practices. "Why do you want to hurt me?" she pleads, still trying to salvage the relationship. Neither one of these people is easy to like, and while I don't need to like characters to appreciate the film, in the case of FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, it really would have helped if I knew what either of these people was thinking. And instead of giving us anything resembling a resolution, the film ends in a cliff hanger so anticlimactic that the entire audience I saw it with was left with cinematic blue balls. (Yes, I know there are two more of these films on the way, but at least give us an angry handy.)
In a way, maybe the film fulfilled its mission by frustrating us like nobody's business. These are two lovers being guided by a sexually broken man, so maybe we don't deserve to be titillated. Maybe we deserve to be spanked for expecting a book born of Twilight fan fiction to teach us something new about human sexuality. Perhaps FIFTY SHADES OF GREY is exactly what our sexually repressed society has earned. Maybe a Cinemax sex movie with higher production values is our price for ignoring character development and unpredictable plot for too long. Who the hell knows, but if you plunk down your hard-earned money to see this one, count yourself as part of the problem.
