Was the Fifty Shades of Grey movie really that bad?
Like most cultural phenomena, you've probably almost forgotten about Fifty Shades of Grey. But this week marks 10 years since the first book in EL James's trilogy of what convention dictates we must call "bonkbusters" made it to the big screen. With Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as the mysterious millionaire Christian Grey, the movie made $570m (£459m) worldwide.
But despite this success, Fifty Shades of Grey became something of a punching bag. The books fit squarely into what tedious people tend to call "guilty pleasures" — you should never be guilty about enjoying something — and it's fair to say that James, for all of her great qualities, is not exactly Shakespeare or Wordsworth.
As a result, it became very easy indeed to bash the Fifty Shades of Grey world on the page and then, subsequently, on the screen. The film won five awards, including Worst Picture, at the Razzies in 2016 and its current approval rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes is just 25%. All of that suggests this was one of the worst movies of the 2010s.
But that's too simple. Fifty Shades of Grey is no masterpiece, but it's far from being the worst film of the decade. It's not even close to being the worst movie released in 2015 — a year that gave us Get Hard, Entourage, Mortdecai, The Cobbler, and of course Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. Put simply, Fifty Shades was just the worst film that most people had heard of.
Read more: Fifty Shades Of Grey author EL James says films' release was 'traumatic time' (PA Media, 2 min read)
Actually, though, it's time to give a lot of credit to Fifty Shades of Grey. Unlike the book on which it is based, the film has a self-referential silliness and playfulness at its heart that undercuts some of the self-serious storytelling deployed by James. While some of the author's worst dialogue — "I'm 50 shades of f***ed up", "my tastes are very singular", etc — made its way into Kelly Marcel's script, there were some fun additions.
The highlight of the movie, without doubt, is the scene in which Ana and Christian engage in a boardroom negotiation over the terms of the contract dictating the rules of their relationship and the limitations around what Ana was willing to allow Christian to do. It's a genuinely funny scene specifically penned for the film, amalgamating several similar segments of the book. Never has the phrase "genital clamps" been discussed in such delightful deadpan.
This sequence perfectly illustrates the tension between the EL James take on Fifty Shades of Grey and the version put forward by Marcel and director Sam Taylor-Johnson. It's one of the key reasons why the first movie works much better than the two sequels, which appear to hew closer to James's vision for the series. While James seems to think of Fifty Shades as high art, Marcel and Taylor-Johnson were prepared to relax and have a bit of fun with it. It's silly escapist fluff and the film had the courage to treat it like that.
Read more: Fifty Shades Of Grey: What Changed From Book to Screen? (Yahoo Entertainment)
Johnson's performance embodies this sense of fun. She brings a luminous snark to Ana, which couldn't be more different from the cringeworthy "oh my" character James wrote, constantly telling the reader about her "inner goddess". Johnson told Vanity Fair that the author wielded a lot of creative control on the set and "just demanded that certain things happen".
'I signed up to do a very different version of the film we ended up making," said Johnson. "We'd do the takes of the movie that [James] wanted to make, and then we would do the takes of the movie that we wanted to make. The night before, I would rewrite scenes with the old dialogue so I could add a line here and there. It was like mayhem all the time."
It's probably too simplistic to suggest that everything bad about the Fifty Shades movie came from James, but it's certainly at its strongest when it deviates from her vision. Few people would argue that Fifty Shades of Grey is a good movie — it isn't — but it's a truly heroic attempt to polish a literary turd into a slice of escapist fun at the multiplex.
Read more: Jamie Dornan knew critics would 'despise' the Fifty Shades of Grey films (The Independent, 3 min read)
Fifty Shades of Grey was the most unique of phenomena — a book everybody had read, without anybody earnestly believing it was good. Against the backdrop of those bizarre circumstances, it's a minor miracle that the film adaptation isn't a complete disaster. We'll always have the genital clamps.
Fifty Shades of Grey is available to stream in the UK via Netflix.
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