Relying on the performances of two appealing, fresh-faced leads with little prior onscreen baggage, the filmmakers have turned their version of “Fifty Shades of Grey” into a sly tragicomedy of manners - Jane Austen with a riding crop, if you will, or perhaps Charlotte Bronte with a peacock feather - that extracts no shortage of laughs from the nervous tension between Ana’s romantic dream come true and the psychosexual nightmare raging just beneath the surface. By happily shedding the book’s 500 or so pages of numbingly repetitive inner monologue and adding the crucial perspective of the camera, the filmmakers have also made Ana a somewhat tougher, more skeptical heroine, played by Johnson with a very appealing combo of little-girl-lost naivete and gradually deepening assertiveness. Banks”) reveal an unexpectedly deft and disarmingly irreverent touch, wisely grasping - more so, perhaps, than James and some of her more slap-happy readers - that a film set in the leathery world of BDSM fetishism might not be without a measure of comic potential. In slowly easing Ana and the viewer into Christian’s private realm of decadence and deviance, Taylor-Johnson and Marcel (who previously scripted that rather more tasteful dominant-submissive psychodrama, “Saving Mr. Imagine Bruce Wayne with a Red Room of Pain in lieu of a Batcave and you’re more than halfway there.Ī self-described “dominant,” Christian invites the naive, sexually inexperienced Ana to be his latest “submissive,” and hands her a lengthy contract outlining the very specific requirements and boundaries of their relationship - “the only sort of relationship I have,” he declares, when she wonders why they can’t just stick to dinner and a movie. As he notes early on, Christian is a man of “many physical pursuits,” which include piloting, stalking, topless piano playing, and recreational bondage: Specifically, he selects and grooms young women willing to be bound, gagged, clamped, lashed and probed for his pleasure and presumably their own.
It’s not just that this American-psycho Prince Charming shuns conventional romance and conducts his relationships on a strictly transactional basis. He sends her some rare first editions (happily, not “The Iliad”), hits on her at the hardware store where she works, and eventually whisks her off to his apartment by private helicopter - at which point James’ contemporary Cinderella story begins to reveal its Angela Carter side. Ana, for her part, responds by looking quietly dazed with lust, distilling the rich and complicated subtext of James’ novel - oh my god, he’s so hot - into a single oh-my-god-he’s-so-hot expression.įollowing their interview, Christian and Ana heighten their mutual attraction with a few not-so-chance encounters. Speaking with Ana in his glass-walled Seattle office, Christian fixes her with the iciest of come-hither stares, his cheekbones practically slicing through the narrative torpor. A nervous, dark-haired English literature student at Washington State U., Anastasia “Ana” Steele ( Dakota Johnson) has been assigned to write a school newspaper article on Christian Grey, a 27-year-old business magnate and university benefactor who turns out to be not just obscenely wealthy and successful, but (as played by Jamie Dornan) impossibly good-looking to boot. And for all the deserved criticisms of Meyer’s prose style, she really had nothing on James in that department, as demonstrated by sentences like “Desire pools dark and deadly in my groin” and “The muscles inside the deepest, darkest part of me clench in the most delicious fashion.” Is it sadomasochistic longing or is it irritable bowel syndrome?Īt any rate, it may partly explain why our heroine spends much of the movie looking not entirely in control of her lunch. A far cry from Stephenie Meyer’s pro-abstinence fantasy, James’ startlingly explicit story proved massively popular with women of all ages, ushering the taboo subject of bondage porn into the mom-friendly mainstream. The “Fifty Shades” trilogy may have first surfaced in 2009 as a work of “Twilight” fan fiction, but it quickly distinguished itself as its own hugely successful, thoroughly dubious pop-lit phenomenon (100 million copies sold and counting).