Movie Review: 'Fifty Shades of Grey'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Bondage. James bondage.
As in E.L. James, that is, the British author of the controversial 2011 runaway best-seller, Fifty Shades of Grey.
And it's her playing field, sometimes referred to as "mommy porn," that we find ourselves in as the global cultural phenomenon (over 100 million copies sold of a book that's been translated into over 50 languages) spreads to the world's movie screens as a decidedly adult entertainment.
"Mr. Grey will see you now," goes the line in the Fifty Shades of Grey trailer. And lots of folks will see him as well. And her.
Fifty Shades of Grey is the first explicitly erotic installment in an S&M trilogy (2012's Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed are both headed for the movie screen as well) and the fastest-selling paperback ever.
So, here it is upon us in risqué, hard-R-rated, movie form, from a woman's perspective on (when else?) Valentine's Day weekend.
Dakota Johnson (the daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) plays virginal college senior Anastasia "Ana" Steele, an English literature major at Washington State University who -- as a last-minute substitute for her ailing roommate, Kate (Eloise Mumford) -- discovers that she is a submissive when she encounters fetishist and control freak Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), a 27-year-old billionaire and bondage-and-discipline enthusiast with an elaborate "playroom" under lock and key when she interviews him for the school newspaper.
This is only the second feature by director Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy) -– who is a woman, by the way, Sam being short for Samantha -– as well as only the second screenplay by Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks), and James is billed as one of the film's producers.
The collaborators have taken the slow-build approach and aimed for sensual tension rather than graphic sexuality in the early scenes as they set up what turns out to be a psychosexual mystery.
But the feature, nonjudgmental and clinical as it is about the mutual-consent sexual practices on display, eventually earns its R-rated stripes, although the sex scenes comprise only a small percentage of the running time and the director aims for explicitness that stops short of being objectionable.
The chemistry between Johnson and Dornan is sufficient for the film's purposes, but she is significantly more skilled and expressive than her co-lead. Which is perhaps as it should be.
And she manages to lend the otherwise humorless drama at least a dash of much-needed casual humor.
It is the combination of Johnson's thespian sensitivity and Taylor-Johnson's directorial control that kick the film off in a much stronger way than we probably have any right to expect.
The presence of the mothers of Grey and Steele, played respectively by accomplished veterans Jennifer Ehle and Marcia Gay Harden, would seem to suggest that there will be much more in the sequels about the family dynamics involved.
In addition to the couple at the film's center are several other couples infrequently seen on a mainstream movie screen: couples such as control and resistance, bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism, reward and punishment, and pleasure and pain.
And accusations that the central relationship is abusive and that the film thus glamorizes domestic abuse have long since been in the air. You make the call. Just know going in that the early sections of the film are much more assured and compelling than those that come later, and that the film is shamelessly incomplete, ending so abruptly with a laughably ineffectual cliffhanger that the makers might as well be handing out invitations to the first sequel.
So we'll eroticize 2½ stars out of 4 for a mainstream erotic romance drama designed to serve as franchise foreplay. Will Fifty Shades of Grey please some viewers and offend or even infuriate others?
It's bound to.
