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The whole phenomenon surrounding the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has always baffled me. I’ve seen it billed as “housewife porn,” a sort of refuge of sexual imagination and fantasy for the otherwise vanilla middle-American. I suppose that makes sense, given our attitudes regarding sex and sexuality in our country. We tend to repress a lot of our kinkier sexual thoughts and desires here in the good ol’ USA, and whenever you have a case of repression, the ignored energy will always come back around in safe, if not bizarre, ways.
So while it made sense to hear about the legions of middle-aged women flocking to a new erotica book with the same fervor as Sutter Cane fans in the movie In the Mouth of Madness, it always felt weird to me that their repressed sexual desires and energy were manifesting as interest in a book about BDSM. But whatever, you know? We’ve all got our kinks and our fantasies, no matter how hidden, and I certainly won’t judge a person for indulging in some thoughts about otherwise taboo sex.
What I will judge—harshly—is taste. I’ve never made it through much of E.L. James’s Twilight fan-fiction turned international bestseller, but the excerpts I’ve read were so eye-rollingly terrible and cringe-worthy that anyone who tells me that they’re a fan of the novels is put immediately on my list of people with suspect taste. It is, of course, safe to say that I went into the screening of Fifty Shades of Grey with the absolute lowest expectations I could muster. To my surprise, my expectations for badness were not only met, but were actually exceeded by this insipid and, frankly, dumb adaptation of work that was already pushing the boundaries of insipid and dumb.
Never in my life have I seen a movie so pointless, so bland, so mind-numbingly boring, or so bad as Fifty Shades of Grey.
You probably already know much about the story. The young and naïve English major Anastasia Steele (played by Dakota Johnson, of 21 Jump Street and Need for Speed) falls under the spell of handsome billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan, best known for his work on the British series, The Fall). The sexually virtuous and innocent Anastasia is taken into a world of forbidden pleasure as she is schooled in the ways of BDSM by Christian.
You would think that a film with such a premise would, at the very least, manage to be sexy. Surely, a film whose main selling point is kinky sex could find a way to be alluring, if not outright arousing. The way people talk about the books, poorly written or no, sexuality ought to ooze off the screens and into the minds (and pants) of the viewer. But no. It’s not even worth watching for the sex.
Not that any movie should be worth watching for sex alone. The best erotic movies—the best of any type of movie, really—work because the characters and their stories are engaging. In this case, the characters are so poorly written and so contrived that you’d be hard-pressed to find any reason to care about anything happening at all.
Little chemistry exists between our two co-stars; I’m not sure I can fault the actors so much as I can fault the source material. Johnson and Dornan deliver their lines with all of the life of a statue carved by an incompetent sculptor. Given the source, that’s probably not even an inaccurate assessment. There’s no characterization to speak of—though why worry about that when you can just spell everything out? You can tell Anastasia is innocent by the way she constantly bites her lip. Christian is powerful because, well, you’re told he is. He’s a billionaire, you see. He owns a loft.
All of this serves to make the journey of each character—sexual awakening for Anastasia, romantic awakening for Christian—the most dull and incomprehensible arcs in recent narrative memory. While I do not purport to have any first-hand knowledge regarding the intricacies of a BDSM relationship, the depictions of such a relationship in this movie feel very much as though they were written by someone who also has little idea what they’re talking about. One can only imagine the novelist saying “I bet this is how this works” as she plotted her scenes of dominance and submission and that vibe carries through in this adaptation. It feels less like a true depiction than it does a supposition of what someone thinks it must be like.
The one credit I will give to the film is that the filmmakers seem to have taken the informed consent criticisms of the book to heart. Much has been made about the rapey content of the novels; critics have assailed the books for their depiction of abusive gaslighting as steamy romance. Little of that remains here (though I can see how some might still view it as problematic). Anastasia has more control over her situation than she did in the books and while Christian is still portrayed as being a manipulative control freak, everyone involved seems to have done their best to show him as respectful despite his more violent sexual desires.
To that end, while the sexual content of the film is higher than most, it’s certainly not the highest I’ve seen in an R-rated film. Considering the kinky nature of the sex involved, it was shot and performed in the most boring and trite way possible. For a story about boundary pushing and excess, there wasn’t a whole lot of either to be seen. As far as cinematic depictions of sex and sexuality go, it was the equivalent of putting vanilla sauce on your vanilla ice cream and then giggling at yourself for being “so bad.”
Being as the film is billed as a steamy Valentine’s Day adventure, there will no doubt be hordes of couples piling into theaters in the hopes of jumpstarting their sexual imaginations for their late night escapades. Anyone hoping for a bit of cinematic Viagra, however, will certainly be disappointed. Indeed, if it’s true that boredom is the killer of any sexual relationship, Fifty Shades of Grey can be regarded as the mass-murderer of intimacy.
Fifty Shades of Grey is in theaters now.
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