In more objective terms, FSOG is about Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), a senior-year English major at a college located in either Washington state, Oregon, or British Columbia, depending on which piece of evidence located in which scene you prefer to believe. Her roommate Kate (Eloise Mumford), a journalism major and the editor, or something, of the school paper, has come down terribly sick, which is why the film opens with Anastasia (Anastasia Steele! That sounds more like the name of a morally questionable Bond girl than the protagonist of an erotic drama. A heterosexual erotic drama, anyway) doing Kate a solid by heading to Grey House, the Seattle-based hub of Grey Enterprises, the massive business operated by 27-year-old Wunderkind Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), who has consented to give Kate an interview. Anastasia's utter inability to function as a journalist - it becomes clear almost immediately that she didn't even read Kate's prepared questions prior to setting in Christian's office - does not in any way offend the incredibly important businessman, who throws himself into stalking the young woman. Only it's not stalking if one is a gorgeous, indescribably wealthy businessman, apparently. She starts to fall in love, but he's more interested in making her the newest in a line of women servicing his very rigid fetishes: he wants to introduce the easily confused virgin into the world of his bondage and punishment-based sex fantasies, with a contract spelling out every last thing Anastasia must do, everything Christian can't do, and how their lives will be structured to facilitate it all. While endlessly discussing this contract, they occasionally have vanilla sex.
So that's the plot. The whole plot, covering 125 minutes worth of movie. It's easy to complain about films in which nothing happens, but that's the kind of criticism I'll be more leery of in the future, now that I've seen Fifty Shades of Grey. For this is a film in which actually nothing happens, all the way up to its enraging non-ending, which not only finds nothing resolved on the way to the film's two sequels, but calls attention to the lack of any story arc or even much of a character arc up to that point. She loses her virginity. That is the totality of the character development that happens to either lead.
That the film is military-grade boring and thuddingly mediocre is, after a sense, an enormous achievement. I haven't read the Twilight fanfic turned copyright-dodging erotic novel by E.L. James that serves as its base, but not for want of trying; only a few pages of the book version of FSOG was enough to scare me out of the rest. And I understand from those who know more that it never really gets better, and that the overall subliteracy of the piece only intensifies after that opening. So the fact that director Sam Taylor-Johnson and writer Kelly Marcel were able to wrest it into something merely banal is worthy of real admiration, even though I'd have personally preferred a reprehensibly awful Fifty Shades of Grey to the one that exists in all its generic flatness. Particularly in light of the extremely well-publicised feuding between Taylor-Johnson and James (who served as one of the producers) over every last damn little thing, and the vivid lack of chemistry between the leads.
Those leads really are something - in a film that stakes everything on the crackling tension between two sexy young people being enough to keep us invested in the scenes of them talking about the nothing that they're doing (the estimate I've seen is that 20 minutes of the film is sex scenes; this seems too generous by at least 25%), having such absolutely unacceptable actors is a film killer if nothing else was. Johnson, at least, has some personality; perhaps dimly aware that everything around her was going terribly wrong, she tries to put an ironic, self-aware spin on things, playing up the almost non-existent comedy of the script and being generally sharper, more acerbic, and wittier than I think Marcel set her up to be.
Dornan, man, he's just the fucking cat's pajamas. You can tell, as clearly as it has ever been possible to psychoanalyse an actor from his performance, that he decided on the second day of shooting that he'd made the wrong decision and wanted out, but knew there was nothing he could do about it. The Belfast native locks himself into a cast-iron American accent so stiff and mechanical that he literally can't inflect any lines, so everything he says comes out in the same angry bark, as Dornan spits out individual words like watermelon seeds. He looks with sullen resentment at Johnson in every one of their scenes together - and it's surely no accident that Taylor-Johnson and the team of editors work hard to keep the lead actors in separate shots as often as possible, and his visibly disinterest in their sex scenes is the absolute antithesis of erotica. One feels that Christian Grey would rather stick his cock in a garbage disposal than Anastasia. And while Johnson at least manages to spin some of her worst dialogue (and there is some vile dialogue here, most of it, I understand, directly taken from the book) in a way that makes it clear that the character doesn't take it very seriously and we shouldn't either, Dornan digs in an makes it all sound so grave and soporific; perhaps it was the only way he could manage to survive such bons mots as "I don't make love. I fuck. Hard." and "I'm fifty shades of fucked-up" without collapsing into giggles. But it doesn't make for good cinema.
While the actors are drowning and Taylor-Johnson fights to keep the movie from turning into an Ed Woodian clusterfuck, the only sparkle is provided by Seamus McGarvey and David Wasco, the cinematographer and production designer, respectively, who collude in making the film live up to its title in the most fascinating way that such an austere palette could provide. There's a sleek coldness to the look of Grey House and Christian's tony abode, with its beautiful, painterly vistas of Seattle, in which the sharp lines of the set and color-starved decorating and the coolly hard lighting all combine to make something beautiful but sterile and dehumanised; if the story seems indecently fixated on selling Christian's cruelty as romantic or erotic, the look of the film quietly but forcibly demands that we really regard him as the icy bastard that, in real life, would be the only appropriate way to respond to him. On top of the whole movie just looking stylish as a motherfucker.
It's the only way in which the film really distinguishes itself. The hope that a woman director would stage sex scenes in any way other than the same old close-ups on nipples and arched backs and all that happen in every erotic thriller made by a man proves to be totally unfounded, leaving us with a smattering of tastefully R-rated setpieces indistinguishable from hundreds of others - even just this year, we had The Boy Next Door using almost all of the same angles in its one big sex scene, and if anything, more emphasis on the nude male backside involved. So it's not sexy. And the filmmakers are so focused on keeping the campiness out of the final product that they succeed only in stripping it of its vitality. So it's not very fun or funny. It's not very anything; it exists, barely, and it occupies time, too much of it, and then it simple falls apart into the credits. Fifty shades of grey, it turns out, look very indistinguishable from an uninterrupted field of beige.
4/10
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