Fifty Shades of Grey - movie review: 'Jamie Dornan's torso, on view more often than not, is tip-top'

Sam Taylor-Johnson has eliminated most of E L James’s writing, giving us pictures instead, well shot, classily framed — and that’s a huge improvement on the book
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David Sexton15 February 2015

Sam Taylor-Johnson has done us all a service. She’s eliminated most of E L James’s writing in her efficient conversion of Fifty Shades.

Gone is the gasping first-person-present narrative that James took over from Twilight, the most self-centred form of storytelling yet devised. Gone is the most insufferable interlocutor in modern fiction, Anastasia Steele’s inner goddess with her pole-vaulting and salsa-dancing. Instead we get pictures, well shot, classily framed — and that’s a huge improvement on the book.

Fifty Shades of Grey

1/9

Taylor-Johnson is still stuck with some of those dire emails, popping up in the corner of the screen — and the dialogue. She had fights with E L James over that and lost. Scriptwriter Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr Banks) had her hands tied. Reportedly, Patrick Marber was hired for rewrites but James insisted on her own words remaining.

So the lines Ana and Christian speak come pretty much straight from the novel, which is to say they are unspeakable as dialogue, always over-explicit, having been composed as porno exclamations, or bullet points in a sales job for BDSM, rather than anything people would ever actually say to each other. Throughout, the dialogue is so phoney, so little situation-generated, it nearly kills the movie.

But not quite. Taylor-Johnson has admirably turned Ana’s fervid viewpoint into a more objective drama, evenly cutting back and forth so we see what he sees and what she sees, turn and turn about. Very fairly, we get to look at Dakota Johnson just as much as at Jamie Dornan. And she’s filmed the five or so protracted sex scenes with discretion and creativity, creating eroticism through camera angles and slick editing, rather than explicitness.

So the sex is softcore, never approaching anything like actual pornography, never offering a glimpse of genitalia, although in real life they do tend to be involved, I understand. Maybe a micro-flash of something or other once, when Dornan unbuttons his jeans? But it could be his thumb. None of that “impressive length”, that “considerable length” specified by James then — although his HQ, Grey House, is a towering erection in its own right.

Taylor-Johnson has volunteered that, when she watches movies, eroticism ends when there’s penetration — and she’s stuck to that aesthetic. There is no infamous tampon, no popsicle and it’s a pass on those sex balls: instead, much play is made with the ice cubes and nipples thing, those vanilla ice cubes. Worth a try!

All the pervier parts of the “contract” have been dealt with by a boardroom meeting in which they are teasingly discussed — “Find anal fisting. Strike it out!” — and Christian’s stalking and sadism has been toned down too. Only in the final flogging with a belt is there real pain and humiliation — and it’s at that point that Ana rebels and walks away, setting up part two of the franchise. But even this is discreetly presented: no beaten bottom to see, move away.

Fifty Shades has nothing at all on Lars von Trier’s shocker, Nymphomaniac. It’s middle of the road: hilariously, in France it’s been rated as suitable for 12-year-olds and up.

As Ana, Dakota Johnson hits the sweet spot between being genuinely beautiful in face and body but not alienatingly so to women viewers wanting to identify with her: she’s neither scarily thin or strikingly featured, just pleasantly oval-faced. And although occasionally going a bit Bridget Jones, she can act (Hollywood royalty after all, the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, granddaughter of Tippi Hedren).

Jamie Dornan doesn’t match up, relying on a pottily fixed stare to convey intensity, slightly compromised by his tendency to squint, and the fact that one of his eyes opens wider than the other, while his cheekbones seem to have distractingly toned little muscles of their own.

He has a curiously old-fashioned face, more suitable for a Spitfire pilot from a war movie (the young Kenneth More, maybe) than a serial killer or serious sadist, however foxy and wolfish he tries to look. He never seems to have quite the autocratic command that Christian Grey, “the world’s most eligible billionaire bachelor”, surely needs: he looks more like a model pretending in a men’s fashion mag. Granted, the torso, on view more often than not, is tip-top.

Skilfully softening and prettifying the book, Taylor-Johnson expresses little vision of her own, save perhaps in one swirling sequence when Ana and Christian dance, and another when they take to the air in a beautiful glider, the sexiest thing in the film. She has very professionally rendered this potent rubbish much less ridiculous, much more of a marketable proposition than could have been expected — and men might well be happy to go along this weekend, with generous eyefuls of Ana as compensation for such service.

Just be sure to have a fleet of Audis and your very own helicopter waiting when you come out if you don’t want to disappoint, guys.

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