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‘Fifty Shades’ adaptation aims for erotic and exotic, lands on boring

In advance of seeing “Fifty Shades of Grey,” I actually started reading the novel. The well-known and hugely successful Twilight fan-fic from writer E.L. James, the first in an inexplicable trilogy, Fifty Shades is everything I would have expected Twilight to be—had I bombarded myself with four books of moping, sparkly vampires and characters as empty as the soul of a men’s rights activist. The only major difference is that Fifty Shades swaps out the abstinence metaphors for bondage/domination sex via a particularly boring Harlequin novel. I got about a hundred pages in before I gave up.

Joshua Kline: Watch these erotic dramas instead

There’s so much lip-biting, muscle-clenching (“down…there”), flush-faced, clunky yet florid language and endlessly repeated descriptions of the Adonis-like beauty of its protagonist, Christian Grey—it’s absurd. The frothy perspective of a 16-year-old living in a 21-year-old girl’s body—it reads suspiciously like a Penthouse Forum letter written by a Mormon.

You’re not supposed to yell at your laptop while reading something sexy. Say what you want about Anaïs Nin, but she never made me facepalm while reading about the nature of female sexual ecstasy. At least she writes more erotically-charged lines than, “Two orgasms… coming apart at the seams, like the spin cycle on a washing machine, wow.” It’s like porn for Dan Brown fans.

I didn’t have much hope for “Fifty Shades of Grey” on the big screen. Weirdly, it was an improvement for a couple reasons. Mainly because I’d never be able to finish the book in less than two hours, and now I don’t have to.

Dakota Johnson is Anastasia Steele, a 21-year-old English Lit student on the verge of graduation from Washington State (more shades of “Twilight”), whose roommate, Kate (Eloise Mumford), writes for the student paper. Kate catches a cold or something and sends Anastasia to interview a billionaire entrepreneur in her stead. Either the coldly charismatic—one might say vampiric—27-year-old Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan).         

Upon meeting Grey, a chiseled, quasi-Aryan Sun god, Ana finds herself quickly swept off her feet by him. He pursues her in subtle ways—like buying her a first-edition set of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles worth more than her tuition. He’s eminently controlling, a man who gets what he wants. Ana wonders why he wants her while confronting her own desires for the first time.

Grey is the ultimate stalker (tracking her phone, showing up at work unannounced). The rich get to be eccentric, I guess. Or at least do things that would completely creep most women out. He passive-aggressively pulls her in only to push her away, teasing hints of a dark secret behind his extravagantly tentative advances. What girl could resist? 

But when Ana—whose nascent conceptions of sex with Grey are as vanilla as a virgin’s (yet more shades of Twilight), discovers he has an NDA, or a non-disclosure agreenment for her to sign and a Red Room of Pain, all that flies through the proverbial looking glass.

Adapted by Kelly Marcel and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (of 2009’s acclaimed “Nowhere Boy”), “Fifty Shades of Grey” is shockingly boring. Those first hundred pages of the book were the first act of the film, which feels perfunctory and empty on screen despite the abscence of Ana’s vacuous internal monologue. “Fifty Shades” could have benefitted from some breathy narration just to make it funnier, since the prose has so many meme-worthy, what-the-fuck moments. But, no. This is serious.

Instead, the film avoids forcing E.L. James’ fevered dialogue from its actors’ pursed lips by relying on Vaguebook looks for erotic suspense and expositional character development worthy of a Chrysler ad. It’s kind of a bummer because I was looking forward to seeing these actors try and make some of the more vapid, head-scratching dialogue. But the film sidesteps those issues by largely re-writing most of it—adding another layer of flaccidity to the proceedings. The equally slick, Cronenbergian visual aesthetic is almost as cold and Canadian as “Crash,” but without the feeling that you’re watching something actually filthy. 

I’m not versed in the BDSM life (though there’s always hope), but I’d think actual adherents would be left feeling incredibly underserved, misrepresented or even contemptuous of the Disney version of what they do. After all, most dominants don’t fly their submissives to a Fortress of Solitude in their own helicopters. In real life, isn’t it just people meeting on Tinder?

These characters are cyphers for pent-up moms who fantasized about boning Edward Cullen while taking their tweens to see “Breaking Dawn.” Sam Taylor-Johnson does the best she can to make them interesting. Her use of frame is one of the only strong suits of “Fifty Shades.”  Dornan and Johnson look great naked, but you never get the sense they’re baring themselves beyond the physical. Their characters are too shallow for any real emotion, and their lack of chemistry subverts the eroticism—if there was ever any to begin with. 

The sad thing is that America needs a film like “Fifty Shades,” just one that does it better—a film that breaks through cultural taboos and starts an open conversation about the state of sexuality in our puritanical, patriarchal society. “Nymphomaniac” tried (check out Josh’s column for more on that), but was never going to capture the zeitgeist like these books, which have mainstreamed faux-literary porn in a way unseen since “Deep Throat” nearly legitimized actual porn in theaters decades ago.   

I didn’t even feel uncomfortable watching this with a crowd. “Fifty Shades of Grey” is the MPAA-approved version of kink. Ironically not violent enough, but still a place where—typically—the female orgasm is shunned, veiled thrusts must be kept to a minimum and no real boundaries are pushed. 

Want more stories from Joe? Check out his review of "Whiplash" and his take on the 2015 Oscar nominations.