The opening of “Fifty Shades Darker” echoes a key scene in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split”: both films feature the flashback of a tormented man, in which his early-childhood self cowers under a bed while an adult hunts for him. In “Split,” the protagonist, Kevin Wendell Crumb, is getting therapy—in Shyamalan’s angry view, too little, too late. In “Fifty Shades,” the second film adapted from E. L. James’s erotic-fiction franchise, Christian Grey is in desperate need of therapy, and, if there were any identifiably human substance to the new film, his seeking it would be central to the plot.
At the end of the first installment, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) couldn’t abide the punishment that the dominant Christian (Jamie Dornan) inflicted on her in his “red room of pain,” his gothic chamber of sexual paraphernalia, and so she walked out. (She had negotiated his contract of submission, but then repudiated it.) Now, in the new movie, the blank billionaire is back—showing up with romance in mind just as Ana, newly equipped with her English degree, begins her dream job as the assistant to Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), the fiction editor of Seattle Independent Press. (Check out the editor’s last name and guess whether he’s a good guy.)
Christian offers himself to Ana as if he were a new generation of cell-phone plan—“no rules, no punishment,” no contract. He loves Ana and is willing to accept a relationship with her on her own terms: it will be “a vanilla relationship.” But, when they get to the bedroom, Christian seems to be short a few beans: he’s still unwilling to be touched by her. A viewer may wonder whether his aversion is at all related to the conspicuous burn marks on his chest, and, midway through the film, deep into their rekindled romance, Ana, too, thinks to ask about them—and, needless to say, gets no meaningful answer. If the burns aren’t enough, perhaps Christian’s admission to her that he’s no mere dominant but a sadist who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on others might prompt Ana to say that she’d like to be with him on the condition that he get help.
Or perhaps Christian’s controlling tendencies outside the bedroom might give her pause. There is, for instance, the very way in which he reappeared in her life: by showing up at a photography exhibit of work by her friend Jose (Victor Rasuk), which (she discovers) features six mural-sized portraits of her, and buying them all. Soon after Ana starts her new job, he probes her for information about the publishing house and considers buying it, too. (She’s dubious about him being her boss; he consoles her with the idea that he’d only be her “boss’s boss’s boss.”) To be fair, Christian has reason to have doubts about her employment: when Jack invites Ana for an after-work drink, Christian stops by the bar and sees instantly (as viewers already have) that the editor’s intentions are predatory. Where a human might later ask Ana whether her boss is harassing her, Christian, after insulting Jack and whisking away Ana, tells her, “He wants what’s mine.”
According to “Fifty Shades Darker,” an intelligent and capable young woman who meets long-established conventional criteria of beauty will inevitably become the target of men’s obsession and abuse, whether nebbishly (Jose), diabolically (Jack), or pathologically (Christian), and such a woman has little to do in life but to choose her abuser while striving to get ahead at work and maintaining at least her professional identity and her financial independence. The film’s story consists, in large part, of the conflict that Ana faces between squiring Christian through his urgent roundelay of business functions and pushing her own editorial career ahead. But whether Christian will even need to put up with Ana’s efforts to retain her professional independence remains undetermined (the one time that she flaunts it, she learns a bitter lesson). Instead, the movie displaces that conflict onto three Grand Guignol villains: the predatory Hyde; Leila (Bella Heathcote), one of Christian’s former “subs,” or submissives, who is stalking him by stalking Ana; and Elena Lincoln (Kim Basinger), Christian’s mother’s friend, who introduced the teen-age Christian to bondage and submission and now is unwilling to let go of him. Christian’s own primary conflict—whether he’s willing to compromise on the fulfillment of his sexual desires for the sake of a lasting and stable relationship with Ana—is likewise dropped unexplored.
Popular culture is popular for a reason; even the most forgettable and disposable works touch on matters of authentic psychological urgency, despite distorting and falsifying and debasing them. That’s why the good ones—the ones that pull more than a few threads from the underlying tangle and let them show through the shiny surface of simplification—take hold of the imagination in ways that defy their modest artistic merits. (The echo chamber of popularity also has a sort of power itself, which may be why there’s something coincidentally nausea-inducing about the vision, in “Fifty Shades Darker,” of an oblivious billionaire with a fierce drive to inflict pain on others.)
“Fifty Shades of Grey” was far from good, but it had the merit of looking inside the red room as a way of looking inside the mind. The director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, filmed the specifics of the sexual relationship between Ana and Christian attentively and patiently, unfolded its psychological implications as they emerged in its physical details. She took her time and made the movie take its time; she took sex seriously. But she didn’t take the characters too seriously—she admitted comedy into the proceedings, and, in the process, she created a star. Under her direction, Dakota Johnson played the role of Anastasia Steele for laughs, lending the character an antic awkwardness that merged with her tremulous, gradual erotic curiosity. Johnson’s vulnerably spontaneous performance, and Taylor-Johnson’s protracted, intimate frankness regarding the teasing and tantalizing of formalized sex games, made the film distinctive.
The new movie is directed by James Foley, and it’s in the realm of the senseless. Where the first film was all about erotic buildup, the new one is strictly Quick Draw McGraw. Its scenes of bondage and its paraphernalia are few and rapid, broken down into snappy, exemplary moments that quickly yield to the familiar pumping and groaning of decades’ worth of Hollywood’s merely illustrative couplings. In attempting to reconfigure Ana as a rising star of the publishing world, Foley saps her of her awkwardness, rendering her suddenly, absurdly, blandly poised, as if she’d got her degree from the Barbizon School rather than Washington State University. There’s no sense of struggle or self-mastery in the notion, no appearance of effort to overcome clumsy steps or impulsive actions; she’s instantly remade as a model young executive, sanded and polished for her place in life—or, rather, in the movie. Anastasia has, in effect, lost her voice, and Johnson’s performance suffers for it.
Foley’s direction could serve as Exhibit A in the story of the demise of the mid-range drama: it didn’t die a natural death but was killed off by the sort of reductive realism that’s on display in “Fifty Shades Darker.” His approach trades on conventions of normative behavior and visual shorthand; it simultaneously shrinks characters to their dramatically functional traits and shrinks the depicted world to the ethnically, psychologically, intellectually, and morally narrow confines of executive suites and limos. The superficial gloss of his direction advertises the film’s luxurious production, without at all reflecting back on the conflicts that it entails or the realms that it excludes.
Some of the greatest Hollywood melodramas (such as Douglas Sirk’s “Magnificent Obsession”) featured plotlines of an even more extravagant absurdity than that of “Fifty Shades Darker.” Their extreme artifice became a framework for extreme ideas and extreme emotions, even in an era of extreme public reticence about what goes on in the bedroom. The freedom of the current age of sexual explicitness invites realms of characterization—and of intimate imagination—that the first film in the “Fifty Shades” series hints at and the second one utterly ignores. “Fifty Shades Darker” ’s indifference to its characters’ identities, conflicts, and desires is matched by its indifference to its own cinematic substance. The film’s bland impersonality is grotesque; its element of pornography isn’t in its depiction of sex but in its depiction of people, of relationships, of situations that, for all their unusualness, bear a strong psychological and societal resonance. There’s nothing wrong with “Fifty Shades Darker” that a good director couldn’t fix.
