Dungeon in the Sky

      Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) stars Jamie Dornan (Christian Grey) and Dakota Johnson (Anastasia Steele).  Pacific Northwest locations include a view of mammoth volcano Mt. Rainier, Seattle providing the film's setting.

     A hardware store clerk who happens to be a very beautiful fresh-faced young woman, Anastasia, goes in the place of her college journalism major roommate to interview Christian Grey.  Millionaire, has his own corporation, has his own building.

     She interviews Grey in his spacious coldly decorated office, floor to ceiling windows, view of the city from a significant height.  She asks a few cliche type questions, feeling uncomfortable, voice small.  He looks to be twenty-nine, has a long gaze and the muscles a rich guy gets because he has the time and trainer to get them.

     I thought, If this man were poor he wouldn't be able to convince Anastasia to be handcuffed by him.

     His secret, he's into bondage.  Dominance and submission.

     He reveals this to her gradually.  If I recall correctly it's thirty-nine minutes into the movie when we find out more about this man some would call weird.  He expects her to sign a contract.  Sexual activities are negotiated.  It all seems a game.

     The more I watched Grey's character the more I thought he didn't quite add up.  It's not the dominance and submission angle that's off base or the premise of the movie, it's his allowance of Anastasia, a sweet woman by nature, she's even a virgin, to slip through a crack in his defenses.

     He's supposed to be in charge, but she's in the habit of changing the tone of his control experience by simply asking a question or making a remark.  Ideally, he's looking for someone who will act the part of slave.  Anastasia doesn't fit that role.  Not only is she pretty, she's strong-willed.

     Christian Grey falls in love.  That struck me as unlikely, given the man's cold personal atmosphere, his compulsive reach for what he wants when he wants it, the "it" being Anastasia, his newest submissive.

     Grey seems a psychopath to me.  One angle on the actor's face makes him resemble Jeffrey Dahmer. As a psychopath or borderline personality, Grey wouldn't care about what Anastasia feels.  Instead, he acts lovesick, indicating his heart really isn't in the dominance and submission game.  I couldn't determine which is the real Grey, although there are fifty shades of him, whatever that means (I've seen the movie just once, so maybe I missed the title's meaning).  I waited for the reversal when Anastasia becomes dominant and Grey takes the submissive part, a role he admits to her he played when he was young with an older woman.

     The two of them locked together in the new reversed role would've made a good ending, although the film's ending, I won't reveal it, has a good enough way of wrapping it up.

     The script's dialogue needed to be rewritten and in some instances not even included.  Take the same dialogue subjects but make them play out as real people talk.  The dialogue too often becomes "Hollywood."  Also "Hollywood" are the nude sex scenes and the bondage scenes.  

     The bondage scenarios, so tame I wouldn't be embarrassed watching them with my parents, are matched in blandness by the nude non-explicit sex scenes.  During those moments I felt like I was watching Pretty Woman in Bondage.  Dakota Johnson is very alluring when she wears clothes, incidentally.  Sexiest moments, the clothed scenes.

     Production design is a strong feature of this film.  It possesses, partly in theme as well, the slick and cold surfaces comprising the images in Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), also about a rich man who seduces a woman sent to investigate him.

     If Grey has acquired the taste for dominance and submission from his youthful experience as a submissive, he seems to know no other way of experiencing sexuality.  While pathetic, his attraction for Anastasia offers the hope he may realize his true self, with her help: a submissive wanting dominance by another--Anastasia, perhaps, who resembles the kind angel she is.

     Grey's loss of composure as he finds Anastasia backing away from him after his sadomasochistic desires show him to be the weak one of the relationship (not that his sexual predilection is wrong, but his attitude towards her).  The same thing happens in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), in which the woman, feeling lost and helpless through most of the movie, finds strength and countenance after the man's betrayal, yet, she goes to him and comforts him at the end.  Anastasia finally makes her view known clearly, even if the final scene is so fraught with nervous yearning between the two it's hard to know what might happen to the couple.  

     Subsequent Fifty Shades films reveal the answer, perhaps.

Vic Neptune