I firmly believe that you can’t appreciate the good without experiencing the bad. So, in the annual dog-and-pony show between the announcement of the Academy Award nominees and the actual ceremony, I like to watch the worst newly-released film I can. While it’s a long shot I’ll be surprised, I need to bet on a movie that’s a nag to satisfy my own “checks and balances” during the Oscar race.
While everyone scrambles to watch the thoroughbreds of Oscar-nominated films they’ve missed to discover their own cinematic winners, I like to slink into a theatre and settle back with a movie that I think will be absolute celluloid trash- an also-ran that makes me appreciate award-worthy films and performances even more by watching evidence of how badly-made a movie can be. My choice of what to watch isn’t easy; I’ll usually gravitate toward something that has lofty ambitions or, at the very least, has a lot to live up to- my reasoning behind this being the higher the expectation, the harder the fall. Following the enormous literary success the book trilogy experienced, I thought “Fifty Shades of Grey” might be the right horse to bet on. In picking the worst new release I could find, ‘Grey’s’ a winner.
You might think my masochistic movie-watching tendency is a highbrow way for me to explain why I watched ‘Grey,’ but it isn’t. I can be as shallow as the next guy: when actress Dakota Johnson (who plays Anastasia in the film) told an interviewer she was comfortable being naked, I had to admit that I was just as comfortable in seeing her naked. Yes, the success of the ‘Grey’ books made me curious- was it as steamy as I was lead to believe, given libraries’ stern warnings that you could actually pick up a communicable disease from the pages of a borrowed copy? Well, if legions of female fans could become hot-and-bothered by main character Christian Grey’s S&M bedroom antics and look to him as their white knight, I could now see after watching the film that the horse Grey rode in on has absolutely no teeth (or edginess to its story) and only produces steam by way of the loads of manure it drops as it trots on by.
Without beleaguering the point, I won’t bore you with ‘Grey’s’ paper-thin plot. Instead, I’ll describe the opening. As Christian does with Anastasia later in the film, when they’re in his “playroom” of whips and handcuffs, I’ll even provide you with a safeword to use to force me to stop this punishing activity that only gives me pleasure. While Christian’s safewords are “red” and ‘yellow,” I’ll simply use one safeword-“stop.” Okay? Here goes:
Anastasia (Johnson) is a young, pretty, naïve and sexually-inexperienced about-to-be college graduate who sets up an interview for her school’s paper with reclusive billionaire and benefactor to her school, Christian Grey (Jaime Dornan), a man in his late-20’s who is described in the film as “ridiculously hot.” Anastasia easily finds a parking space on the city street in front of Grey’s office building, aptly named Grey House. The lobby of Grey’s office swarms with a staff of attractive blond women in business suits who seem to be this century’s answer to the girls who swayed behind Robert Palmer in the “Addicted to Love” video. One such blond escorts Anastasia to Grey’s office to conduct the interview. Anastasia cutely fumbles for a pen and Grey provides her with a personalized pen that she proceeds to orally fixate on as she asks Grey hard-hitting questions like “Are you gay?” The unsmiling, blank-staring Grey replies no and Anastasia breathlessly asks another hard-hitting question. At the end of the interview, Grey escorts Anastasia to the elevator. As Anastasia tries to collect herself upon leaving Grey’s presence as she waits for the elevator, Grey grimly stares at her in that smoldering way perfected by Robert Pattinson in the “Twilight” movies and….
Stop. (Sorry, I had to use the safeword myself).
I thought at its core, ‘Grey’ could be a clever idea- imagine a hybrid of “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “9 ½ Weeks” where a suave, loner billionaire with a mysterious dark side seduces a woman fascinated by what makes him tick, only the dark side isn’t he amasses his fortune by staging robberies for thrills, his real thrills come from seducing women and securing their consent to submit to dominant-submissive sex games. Now, imagine this story written by a tween without every other word of dialogue being ‘like,’ and that’s pretty much “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Insipid and creepy, ‘Grey’ features characters whose only depth and motivations are to do exactly what the story dictates and demands- it places them in the unrealistic scenarios any of them would have avoided had they been written with any sense of logic, caution or reasoning skills.
When Christian tells Anastasia that if she were his girl, she wouldn’t walk for a week, or tells her he won’t touch her without her signing a non-disclosure agreement, these would normally be automatic “red flags,” but not in ‘Grey’s’ world. Anastasia gives serious consideration to this written agreement because she’s so infatuated with him, despite the fact that everyone in the movie’s attractive and she’s not out for his money.
Given the unbelievably sugar-coated sadism that Grey dispenses in his “playroom,’ it makes sense that the “red flags” in ‘Grey’ are as benignly sweet as flags made from cherry fruit roll-ups. If you ingest enough of them, you’ll get sick. In the case of ‘Grey’s’ gift horse, one look into its mouth and you can understand why it’s toothless.