Power is the name of this game, not sex.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Grade: C
Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy)
Screenplay: Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks) from E.L. James novel
Cast: Dakota Johnson (Need for Speed), Jamie Dornan (Marie Antoinette)
Rating: R
Runtime: 125 Min.
by John DeSando
"My inner goddess is dancing the merengue." Anastasia Grey from the novel, Fifty Shades of Grey
You’re approaching this filmed version of the wildly successful sex novel Fifty Shades of Grey in the right way if you think that quote is sophomoric, typical of a naïve English major stepping out into life. It is a silly statement, and the heroine of the film, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), is less naïve than she is a thrill seeker.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a torture of unfulfilled curiosity about S-M, for the heat is low on the chili pepper. Although Steele’s exposed breasts supposedly lead to greater erotica, they rather are the limits of exposure and the wrong signs of sensuality, which should emanate anyway from words, not just flesh.
The purveyor of the sexual fantasy, the dominant Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), is a sadly repressed, secret misogynist, whose introduction of Ana to the pleasures of his red room (handcuffs, whips, et al.—the usual but just more finely turned out) turns out to be an exploration of low-level power plays rather than a turn on. In fact, her role as submissive eventually turning dominant is never fully explored here, just hinted at, but enough of the hints, please: She’s a power bottom; I can feel it even if I can’t see it.
Mr. Dornan may be the problem, or perhaps director Sam Taylor-Johnson is, because the actor is a much better model than actor. At the least, he needs to have depths that can be explored, but here he seems cyber-like stoic. When he says, “I don't do romance. My tastes are very singular. You wouldn't understand,” the hidden promise that he is complicated and ultimately loveable never reaches the audience.
In other words, although it takes quite a bit of bad sex to bore me, this antiseptic delivery of pleasure is just that, or just what you would have expected from boring Bella Swann of The Twilight tortures (Anastasia being based on Bella, I am told). Bella was boring, Ana is boring, and this film is boring. Yet in the cold light of analysis, Johnson is the best part of the film, a not particularly beautiful woman, all the better for us to identify with, and a semi-naif adventuring out without a map.
To witness Ana panting from the first time she sees him in his perfectly tailored suit covering a perfectly sculpted body is to question immediately what kind of a Romantic she really is (or maybe I’m carrying my love for 19th-century sensibilities too far into the 21st). Again it could be the director calling for some over-the-top acting.
Hundreds of years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer included a story in his Canterbury tales that explained what women really want—mastery over men. Now that’s telling it like it is, and I suspect this tale, which goes into three novels, will end up the same way. The film is only a disappointing beginning.
But getting anywhere meaningful through flabby porn is too slow and stupid, even for a broken-down Catholic boy in whom the S-M-leaning nuns instilled a life-long interest in passionate sex only to discover it’s not in films that promise to bare it all but rather hidden deep in the Cinderella story.
Mother Mary, help us all in this dead-zone time of year, where good movies are much scarcer than good sex.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
