What a fun, sexy time young Anastasia Steele is having in Fifty Shades of Grey, director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s surprisingly winning adaptation of the runaway Twilight-fan-fiction-turned-bondage-fantasy novel. Anastasia, or Ana, is about to graduate from college when she meets a seriously handsome young billionaire with whom she shares an immediate, intense connection. She’s stepping into the real world and, hey, here’s this gorgeous playboy waiting to welcome her. And so the movie progresses for most of its tidy run, Ana and her billionaire, Christian Grey, treating sex as conversation, he showing her what he knows he’s into, while she, newly not a virgin, figures out what she likes for the first time. The two are polite and witty and even cute with one another, a genuine romance bubbling up underneath all the smooth seduction. The movie has a refreshing, friendly, youthful energy; it’s exciting, and excited, and, for the most part, pretty sex-positive. Show Which was, well, kinda shocking to me, as someone who hasn’t read E.L. James’s sex-filled tome, but certainly has heard a lot about it. Like the character who inspired her, Twilight’s Bella Swan, I expected Ana to be meek and featureless and utterly passive, a blank, empty vessel for readers’ and viewers’ sexual and romantic longings. And I suppose Ana is that, a little bit. But in the movie, she’s also funny and expressive and centered, not sapped of agency as it seemed she might be, not the timid, self-sacrificing mouse of so many melodramas of this ilk. Credit to Kelly Marcel, who wrote the screenplay, for that, and of course to Taylor-Johnson, who stages this beloved, closely held material with a respectful but not obsequious smile. But it’s Dakota Johnson, playing Anastasia, who really brings her to life. Yes, Johnson is beautiful—bright and dewy but not exactly innocent—but she’s also a smart, intuitive performer, perfectly calibrating tone and tempo as she navigates the film, which, plot-wise, is a little less schematic than you might think. Meaning, not much happens in Fifty Shades of Grey. Anastasia meets Christian while interviewing him for her college newspaper. They flirt, he pushes away, she pulls in, they finally do it, and then they do it a bunch more times. There’s a slight narrative arc as we near the film’s hilariously ballsy end, but mostly this is a movie about interior, nonlinear things. As Johnson plays it, it’s a movie about curiosity, and the giddy release of letting go. That Anastasia is able to let go with a dead-sexy billionaire who looks like Jamie Dornan is, of course, the stuff of movie luck—the fantasy is not that Anastasia has slightly kinky sex, but who she has it with. (Which may be a small point, but I think it makes a difference!) Johnson and Dornan have nice chemistry together, he the leonine predator and she the trembling doe, except he’s pretty gentle and she’s tougher than she looks. On the whole, Fifty Shades is a lot tamer than it could have been. Which is good in some ways, as it allows for the movie to be as playful as it is. Ana and Christian’s sexual exchange genuinely feels like a game, one they are playing equitably, both turned on and eager to see what happens next. Ana is cautious about Christian’s proposal, that she sign a contract and officially become his submissive for an undisclosed period of time, but she’s not outright frightened, she’s not trapped or railroaded. Because this is pretty light bondage we’re ultimately talking about here, the game is airy and low-stakes, a post-graduate period of sexual exploration that seems healthy and safe. But, of course, if the sex were more intense, Fifty Shades might actually become the transgressive sex fable it kind of wants to be, one that genuinely challenges our square notions of what is and isn’t deviant sex, that questions our perhaps rigid ideas of how power dynamics should function in a relationship. Free of full-frontal nudity and excessive thrusting and, well, orgasming as this movie is, it never gets to that envelope-pushing place. Which I suspect will disappoint many people, understandably. Oh well. Maybe I’m a sex-shaming prude, but I didn’t mind getting the less explicit version, because the movie is at its best when it keeps things swift and light. When the movie does slow down and get serious toward the end, the romantic push and pull gets repetitive, and the literary limits of the source material begin to poke through. (The film’s title is sort of explained in one unbelievably bad line.) Dornan, a god on Earth with a wobbly American accent, is forced to play the same notes over and over again. Which I don’t mind watching him do, but he begins to seem bored. The film’s plotlessness becomes a burden in the last 20 or so minutes, when something like a climax is needed but all the film can muster is yet another argument. And then there’s that ending—a wicked little fake-out cliffhanger that many audiences are going to hate, but, man, you have to at least respect the studio’s moxie. It's outright demanding that you go see the sequel, and you know what? I will. Fifty Shades of Grey is not the lame, hot-and-bothered fantasy romance many, including myself, thought it would be. It’s got wit and humor and a modest intelligence about human behavior that, say, the Twilight movies never had. And there’s something almost sweetly nostalgic about it. In one scene (reminiscent of the flight-as-foreplay sequence in The Thomas Crown Affair), Christian pilots a glider with Anastasia as his passenger. He does barrel rolls as Taylor-Johnson’s camera swoops along behind them, one of her many spot-on music choices—all either thumping or dreamy—swelling and soaring. And we see Anastasia, awed and thrilled, in the cockpit, sky and earth swirling around her, young and free and reveling in all this beautiful risk. What a swoony, perfectly lovely way for a recent grad to greet the rest of her life, occasional rough landings and all. Oh, if only 22 had been that exciting for all of us. What is the whole point of Fifty Shades of Grey?Brief summary "Fifty Shades of Grey" by E. L. James is an erotic novel exploring a tumultuous relationship between a college student and a wealthy businessman, delving into themes of love, power, and sexual desire. Are the Fifty Shades movies any good?Feels like an elegantly made - the cinematography and score are top notch - night time soap opera. At least, the film goes out of the way to show the use of condoms. If this is love, no thanks. In terms of story and character, this film is in desperate need of a safe word. What is the message of Fifty Shades of Grey?It is being heavily promoted as a romance which pushes contemporary boundaries of sexual explicitness. However, the underlying message is that what women really want is to be dominated by men. What did Jamie Dornan wife say about 50 Shades?Amelia WarnerJamie Dornan / Wifenull |
