Released: February 13th,
2015
Rated: R
Distributor: Focus Features
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan
Directed by: Sam Taylor-Johnson
Written by: Kelly Marcel
Personal Bias Alert: haven’t read the book, expected it to be bad
1.5 of 10
The
worst thing your entertainment can be is boring. Movies, television, books, magazines, and
games all exist to fill our free time with relatively cheap and consistent ways
to distract ourselves. Really, keeping
your attention is the lowest bar these things have to hit, so when a movie
fails to do even that, it’s pretty much an abject failure. Fifty Shades of Grey, meet abject failure.
What makes the whole Fifty Shades debacle even more frustrating is that they weren’t trying
for anything difficult. The entire
selling point is sex, particularly the BDSM-infused sexual awakening of a
college student named Anastasia Steele.
This might be a good time to note that the film is based on Twilight fan-fiction, but the salacious
premise and ridiculous character names makes it seem more like an adaptation of
a porno. The other main character? Christian Grey, because he’s the experienced
dominant, so of course he has to have an ironically wholesome sounding name.
What
minor defense I can muster for this film is that it is well made. The $40 million budget certainly wasn’t
wasted, as the set design, costumes, lighting, hell, even the cinematography is
well done. None of it was particularly
impressive, but it’s all very solid.
Still, even a master at these things needs a story to make a satisfying
movie. Don’t believe anyone who tells
you that ‘so-and-so is so great I would watch his/her film if it was a two hour
shot of a boot.’ If anyone says that to
you, have them sit down and watch Fifty Shades of Grey. They will change
their mind.
The
failure of this film can be tracked back to an incident early in the writing
process when Kelly Marcel turned in the first draft of what she assumed would
be an NC-17 film. Universal Studios then
shot the film’s fatal blow, giving feedback that Fifty Shades must get an R-rating.
An R-rated, mainstream film is entirely the wrong medium for this
material. With the MPAA’s restrictive
guidelines on sex, filmmakers are already wary about how they show traditional
sex and are pretty much banned from showing anything that strays from the norm
if they want to stay in R territory. With the backing of Universal, one of the six
studios that are members of and fund the MPAA, they were able to slide in
more than I was expecting, but even then it’s only the tamest of BDSM
acts. Even worse, the sex scenes are
barely able to start. They’re cut so
short that the scenes never feel all that sexy and barely register in the
grand, 2+ hours that this film takes from your life.
The
rest of the ‘plot,’ which everyone knows was just filler in the books, is some
of the dullest, most déjà vu inducing sequences I’ve ever seen slapped
together. The romance between Anastasia
and Christian (feel free to chuckle again at their names) starts and continues
without reason or ounce of chemistry.
Their conversations are, without variation, about how Christian wants to
go further and Anastasia isn’t ready.
The amount of time spent on this same conversation, in which they’re
barely able to reference the actual acts they’re talking about, is pretty much
the embodiment of the Charlie Kaufman line “Constantly talking isn’t
necessarily communicating.” In fact, I
take that back. The constant talking in
this film is definitely not communicating.
There’s
many more things I could say about this film, like how troubling it’s judgmental
stance on BDSM and untraditional sex acts are, how revolting it’s dialogue is,
and how it utterly lacks a climax (pun completely intended), but I’m going to
let it lie. I’ve already given this film
far more of my time than it deserves.
Other
Notes:
Ø Director Sam Taylor-Johnson either had never seen The Fall or was intentionally referencing it in the opening shots
of Jamie Dornan running.
Ø For
anyone who’s sad that the tampon incident from the book wasn’t filmed, here’s a
link to a poem you might like. Warning,
it’s graphic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiRWkIZ9p3o
Ø My
favorite lines are the ones that were intentionally bad:
“It’s just behind this
door."
“What is?”
“My playroom.”
“Like your Xbox and
stuff?”
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