Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
When college senior Anastasia Steele steps in for her sick roommate to interview prominent businessman Christian Grey for their campus paper, little does she realize the path her life will take. Christian, as enigmatic as he is rich and powerful, finds himself strangely drawn to Ana, and she to him. Though sexually inexperienced, Ana plunges headlong into an affair -- and learns that Christian's true sexual proclivities push the boundaries of pain and pleasure.
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78 films that influenced Fifty Shades of Grey
What critics say influenced Fifty Shades of Grey
Despite citing Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris as a tonal touchstone, and nodding cheekily to American Gigolo/Psycho, the result smacks more of Adrian Lyne’s blandly naff 9½ Weeks, the S&M frankness of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse usurped by the archaic softcore of Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O.
Although the book’s soft-X explicitness has been toned down to a hard R, this is the first studio film in many years to gaze directly at the Medusa of sex — and unlike such male-leer predecessors as 9½ Weeks, it does so from a woman’s perspective.
Now the film adaptation, likely the first of four films to be milked from James’ three books, is poised to lure people to movie theaters, just as previous exploitation gone mainstream films “9½ Weeks” and “Basic Instinct” did in decades past.
Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag, this neo-“9½ Weeks” is above all a slick exercise in carefully brand-managed titillation — edgier than most grown-up studio fare, but otherwise a fairly mild provocation in this porn-saturated day and age.
“9½ Weeks” was more inflammatory, and “Blue Velvet” was more dangerous and disturbing.
Despite citing Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris as a tonal touchstone, and nodding cheekily to American Gigolo/Psycho, the result smacks more of Adrian Lyne’s blandly naff 9½ Weeks, the S&M frankness of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse usurped by the archaic softcore of Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O.
Dornan could have answered, “Have you seen The Story of O.?” Anyone who’s old enough to remember the old fear and hysteria caused by S&M movies like Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour and Tim Blake Nelson’s O and Adrian Lyne’s Nine 1/2 Weeks; or anyone who’s seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and the trashily vicious Color of Night; or anyone who’s watched Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader in the imperfectly exciting Secretary, or watched Girls’s audacious second season or any year of Sex and the City is likely to leave Fifty Shades of Grey perplexed by its uncontroversial mildness.
Though Ana’s read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she’s somehow remained innocent of any knowledge of love as pain—indeed, innocent of any knowledge at all, though she’s a fast study.
She connects that trait to her field of study, although, given how she mumbles the title Tess of the d'Urbervilles, we start to wonder whether her education has paid off in any meaningful way.
It’s almost eerie how much she reminds you of her mother, Melanie Griffith, especially given the similarities between “Fifty Shades” and “Working Girl,” which was also about a mousy woman learning to assert herself in the company of a stinking-rich suitor.
What’s nice about the negotiation scene is how much Johnson evokes Griffith creating her own angles in Working Girl, in which Griffith’s screwball-dingbat delivery belied great reserves of self-confidence.
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Dornan plays Christian Grey as icy and one-note (true to its Robert Pattinson/ Twilight inspiration) and Johnson's Anastasia Steele is a revelation, a mumbling, awkward comedic presence on par with Kristen Wiig.
“Fifty Shades of Grey” began in emulation of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, whose plausible spiritual lessons are closer to the surface.
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.
5. James (real name: Erika Mitchell) tweaked the Twilight teen virgin Bella Swan into the slightly older Anastasia, and reimagined sensitive vampire Edward as the well-mannered sadist Christian.
Grey, a vaguely defined "businessman," is an unconvincing mix of Regency aristocrat and high-school hunk, while Anastasia is another Bella Swan ("Twilight"), though with even bigger daddy issues.
As with the first “Twilight” movie back in 2008, the one directed with canny, low-key commitment by Catherine Hardwicke, James’ book has been de-crudified, its most operatic expressions of lust stricken from the record.
Fifty Shades is best compared to 1990’s Pretty Woman.
Not since Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman" has there been such a fantasy catch for the women in the audience - as well as Ana.
Aside from the BDSM material that doesn't really show its head until fairly well into the film, the story comes off somewhat like a fairly lame version of "Pretty Woman" and a far less interesting look at the world of kinky sex than occurred in "Secretary" (with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader).
A successful male control freak who’s compelled by an emotionally pure woman to open himself up is the basis for thousands of romances and is far less disturbing in its implications than, say, Pretty Woman, that launching pad for American Sweetheart Julia Roberts in which the prince purchases his princess on the open market.
What obviously comes to mind is Pretty Woman, in which Richard Gere’s antisocial businessman decides to make Julia Roberts’s prostitute The One. Fifty Shades of Grey takes 125 minutes to do what that movie did in its first dozen or so scenes.
The way this film works its archetypes is reasonably clever, though I would point out that Pretty Woman worked exactly the same way 24 years and 11 months ago.
The handling of the BDSM sex play is dreadfully cliched in terms of structure (3 heated romps and a final dramatic one); however, the actual presentation of the “love scenes” recalls the style of director Adrian Lyne (Unfaithful, Nine 1/2 Weeks), favoring artsy close-ups of human form, curve and the intimate sensations of touch, feel and response, rather than the raw carnality seen in something like Basic Instinct (my generation’s landmark erotic thriller movie).
Dakota Johnson, playing Anastasia, is asked to bare a little more skin, though nothing that will register on the pop culture Richter scale like Sharon Stone’s leg-uncrossing in Basic Instinct.
The sex scenes in “Basic Instinct” are rawer and sexier than anything here, and as a result Christian comes off as the most lightweight dominant in the history of BDSM.
This isn't the next Basic Instinct; it's the next Sliver.
Now the film adaptation, likely the first of four films to be milked from James’ three books, is poised to lure people to movie theaters, just as previous exploitation gone mainstream films “9½ Weeks” and “Basic Instinct” did in decades past.
The novel is very likely the worst-written international bestseller since the “Twilight” series and maybe since, once upon a time in the same kingdom of forbidden love, “The Bridges of Madison County.”
It’s no Clint Eastwood’s superheroic saving of “The Bridges of Madison County,” but it’ll do.
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Despite citing Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris as a tonal touchstone, and nodding cheekily to American Gigolo/Psycho, the result smacks more of Adrian Lyne’s blandly naff 9½ Weeks, the S&M frankness of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse usurped by the archaic softcore of Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O.
It’s all worlds away from the darker rooms of bondage classicism: the ritual torments of The Story of O and the troubling compulsions of Nine and a Half Weeks.
Dornan could have answered, “Have you seen The Story of O.?” Anyone who’s old enough to remember the old fear and hysteria caused by S&M movies like Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour and Tim Blake Nelson’s O and Adrian Lyne’s Nine 1/2 Weeks; or anyone who’s seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and the trashily vicious Color of Night; or anyone who’s watched Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader in the imperfectly exciting Secretary, or watched Girls’s audacious second season or any year of Sex and the City is likely to leave Fifty Shades of Grey perplexed by its uncontroversial mildness.
Otherwise they make a curiously uninteresting pair, with Johnson overdoing the trembling lower lip while Dornan musters little beyond an icy stare and slight smirk, though he is quite a clothes horse, as an opening scene set in his elegant walk-in closet, somewhat reminiscent of “American Psycho,” demonstrates.
Christian Grey is basically the Patrick Bateman (“American Psycho”) of sex, to the point where “American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis saw so much of Patrick in Christian that he actually begged “Grey” author E. L. James for the right to write the film’s screenplay.
(It’s a shame, though, that American Psycho-era Christian Bale was not available to give it a try.)
Dornan gives us a stony, domineering, self-obsessed Christian - a monster not far removed from Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (memorably played on film by Christian Bale).
I suppose that would be fine if the film at least generated some sort of sexual heat or was instead a blackly comic deconstruction of its source material, along the lines of Mary Harron’s American Psycho.