Who Shot It: Seamus McGarvey. McGarvey is a cinematographer who can, without a moment’s hesitation, say that he has led a full career, shooting everything from low-budget indies to one of the very biggest movies of all time. He began his feature career shooting the directorial debuts of two heavyweight British actors, Alan Rickman (The Winter Guest) and Tim Roth (The War Zone), eventually making his American debut with Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity. It was in America where he shot the aforementioned mega-blockbuster, The Avengers, in addition to the mere blockbuster Godzilla (for all that movie’s problems, McGarvey’s work on it is absolutely excellent). But his most fruitful collaborations have been with British directors Joe Wright and Sam Taylor-Johnson (née Taylor-Wood), both of whom he started working with on short films. With Joe Wright, he shot the sources of his two Oscar nominations, Atonement and Anna Karenina, plus The Soloist and the upcoming Pan (where he shared DoP duties with Ridley Scott collaborator John Mathieson). With Taylor-Johnson, he shot numerous shorts and her feature debut Nowhere Boy (where she met her husband, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and where Taylor-Johnson apparently proves that he’s actually a good actor and not a charisma black hole). Some of the other assorted highlights of his career include Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Mike Nichols’ Wit, the pilot of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Stephen Dalrdy (*shudder*)’s The Hours, two more upcoming films, Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, and giving the world Philip Seymour Hoffman’s hilarious bad attempts at playing basketball in Along Came Polly. Wait, I forgot to mention that he also worked with Taylor-Johnson on her adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. White chocolate!
What Do You Mean, Story: If you’ll recall, early in this series, I reviewed all five Twilight movies. My thoughts on them were, in order, as follows: Very bad but fun-bad, very bad but boring-bad, much better but still boring and kinda bad, KILL IT WITH FIRE, and shockingly entertaining considering what came before. With this groundwork laid, there was pretty much no chance that I wasn’t going to cover the movie based on Twilight fanfic for this series considering who shot it. And here we are. My inner goddess rues the day I decided to do this series.
I have not read the Fifty Shades books, but I have seen excerpts from them online, and oh dearest me, they were hilarious. They called out for some trash maven to make the best-worst movie imaginable out of this. Instead, they went the dully respectable route and enlisted Taylor-Johnson to direct it. Universal choosing her to direct it makes sense, given that one of her short films (Death Valley, shot by McGarvey) is about a man masturbating, but this project didn’t need prestige, it needed hackwork. Sure, the prestige didn’t hurt the movie, given that it still broke box office records upon its release, but it didn’t help much, given that it still got critically panned. And even worse than not helping it with critics, that prestige is ultimately the first and definitive nail in Fifty Shades‘ coffin as entertainment.
Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, the only one here even trying) is a clumsy college senior with a good head on her shoulder and a 4.0 GPA (we know this because right in the first scene of the movie she announces to her roommate that she has a 4.0 GPA). Within the first five minutes of the movie, she’s taken her roommate’s place in interviewing billionaire mogul (in what exactly he does is unspecified) Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan, #NotMyChristian), and they hit it off immediately despite Christian only possessing one facial expression, that being “stern, but willing to give it a try”. Christian soon visits the hardware store where Ana works, standing in the aisle waiting for her like fucking Hannibal Lector. Their romance only blossoms from here. It reaches its fever pitch when Ana goes to a bar and calls Christian, and Christian, able to detect during the phone call that not only is Ana drunk, she is dangerously drunk (this puts him in competition with Vanilla Ice, who so memorably determined the location of kidnappers by a barely-distinguishable sound in the background of the ransom tape, for the title of World’s More Perceptive Detective), he goes over to the bar and takes her back to his place when she passes out. She takes the pill and orange juice Christian has arranged next to her bed (and without a moment’s hesitation either), and is relieved when Christian reveals that he had the courtesy not to sleep-fuck her. This is when he reveals to her the exact nature of his sexual preferences, shows her his sex dungeon, and makes her sign a non-disclosure agreement (isn’t this where all great relationships start?). Soon enough, he drops a contract on her stating that she will be the Submissive to his Dominant and laying out the specifics of their relationship. Ana takes some time to think it over (if you’re aroused by contract law, you’re gonna love this movie), and then they have a meeting about it, and then the movie forgets about that until the last ten minutes, and then it ends.
This movie is bad. Even if you haven’t seen this movie, you probably knew that it was bad and why it was bad. Yes, Christian Grey is just a massive creep outside of his fondness for S&M (it doesn’t help that he’s played with all the charisma of a hunky automaton). Yes, the sex is the least shocking kind possible without it just being good old penis-in-vagina. Yes, the dialogue is awful, even with the worst of it (the stuff I read in the excerpts, the stuff pontificating about elevators and inner goddesses) removed. Yes, it equates enjoying sadomasochism with being traumatized in life. Forget all that. That stuff certainly doesn’t help the movie’s case, but that’s not what really kills it. This movie sucks because it is boring. Like genuine cure-for-insomnia boring. It’s as if Sam Taylor-Johnson saw how monotonous the sex scenes in the otherwise-excellent Blue is the Warmest Color were, and said “Hey, I’m gonna one-up that Kechiche guy and make this whole thing boring!”. The aforementioned prestige does nothing but flatten out the uber-trashy premise, rendering the sex, the contract, pretty much everything inert. And as much as that, what makes this movie so goddamn dull is that it has no rhythm. It lurches from dull sex scene to dull non-sex scene and back. The last hour in particular is nothing but wheel-spinning, dragging out the inevitable (Ana gets tired of Christian’s S&M ways and doesn’t want to sign the contract) and killing time. Given how the movie can’t sustain two hours, let’s just say that I’m more than a little dubious on how the book sustains 514 pages (maybe E.L. James used a really big font). Not that I’m going to read the damn thing to find out for myself.
Screw That, Let’s Talk Pretty Pictures: McGarvey to the rescue. Like Godzilla, but tenfold, McGarvey’s cinematography is this movie’s saving grace. Christian repeats throughout the movie that he likes to exercise control, and McGarvey follows suit with his compositions. Most of the shots are rigidly symmetrical in one way or another, and they largely unfold in tableaux, giving every scene a layer of discomfort, even the ones without whips. More than framing, McGarvey exerts complete control over the film’s limited yet effective color scheme. For the scenes in Grey’s (phallic) office building, McGarvey doesn’t stray too far from the shades of grey suggested by the title. Whenever the scenes in Grey’s surroundings deviate from this color and lighting scheme, McGarvey still keeps a clean, relatively limited palette (just look at the pure blue of his bedsheets) and tightly-controlled lighting (just look at how impeccably-lit Christian is sitting at his laptop in the third screenshot). But the scenes with Ana are messier, with less “pretty” lighting and more oversaturation, with Ana occasionally resembling a tomato. When one character travels into the other’s world, they don’t feel like they belong, essentially deeming Ana and Christian doomed as a couple just through aesthetics. I just wish it took a lot less time for the characters to get the goddamn hint.
Favorite Shot: Ana and Christian’s contract negotiation is shot and staged like a Michael Mann “meeting of two formidable minds”, with the precise back-and-forth of Heat and the stylized colored lighting of Manhunter. And also with jokes about butt plugs (Mann was right to cut that stuff out of The Last of the Mohicans).
Is Is Worth Watching: Rain dance! But seriously, fuck no.
Stray Observations:
– One of this film’s editors is Anne V. Coates. You may know her work; she’s edited The Elephant Man, Erin Brockovich, Out of Sight, and, oh yeah, fucking Lawrence of Arabia.
– I really want to share this; a profile on Seamus McGarvey from a Fifty Shades fan-site.
– Speaking of Along Came Polly, this film’s many spanking scenes only reminded me of PSH describing his protocol for dates in Polly.
– I know I said that Bono would co-write this entry, but when it came time to write this up, all he did was email me the lyrics to “Love is Blindness”. I know the words to the song, Bono, and it looked an awful lot like you copy-and-pasted them from a lyrics site with formatting errors left in! Goddamnit, the least you could have done to counteract that disappointment was send me those fucking t-shirts!
– I came distressingly close to making the below image the header.
– The early reviews of McGarvey’s next film, Pan, make it sound awful. Not Fifty Shades-awful, but awful nonetheless.
– T! Time-out, I’m burnin’, my fingers are burnin’.
Up Next: Old school! But seriously, I genuinely don’t know what’s coming up next.