Fifty Shades Freed
The fact that Christian Gray (Jamie Dornan) seems to regress after marriage tells you everything you need to know about not just him, but the big-screen adaptations of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades novels, in general. I felt as though Christian made some real progress and development as a character in the second film, which was part of the reason I thought it was better than the first one, but any progress seems to go right out the window for the purposes of story here, and it weakens the finale of this trilogy when it should be building to this climactic sense of Christian and Anastasia Steele as a couple. That’s not the only way this franchise skips the tracks, however, when it should be crossing the finish line.
One thing the film gets right in the end, though, is the way Anastasia Steele has grown as a character, and, even if the movies are not great, Dakota Johnson has done pretty great work in this role. Granted, there are still times when you want to completely shake Ana and go, “Why aren’t you leaving this man?” (I mean, how much time has passed in this series to where they go from meeting to marriage?), but Ana has become her own woman in this series, and she is smart in a lot of ways she wasn’t at the beginning of the series, especially when it comes to handling Christian and reading him the riot act. I love what Johnson has done with this role (the scene where she calls out an architect not respecting her position as Christian’s wife, as well as a late scene after an unexpected announcement, stand out), and we see her get to do some strong work in a movie that doesn’t deserve it, but that kind of goes for the franchise, as a whole.
“Fifty Shades Freed” begins with Christian and Ana getting married, which, if you’ll recall, Christian asked her in the last one. We see them go on their honeymoon and there’s a montage of that which gets cut short when work comes from Christian’s company that someone has broken in and set a fire at his company. That someone, it turns out, is Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), who used to be Ana’s boss at the publishing firm she works at before he sexually assaulted her, and Christian (who had just bought the firm) had him fired. Is this more than just revenge, though? Shouldn’t our focus be on the fact that a straight-up narcissist and dominant personality has gotten married to a woman trying to push him to be better, and that kind of has its troubles?
The material with Jack Hyde not only feels like E.L. James had a tough time justifying a third full-length book with this story, but it also pushes the film into conventional thriller territory, and while director James Foley is well-equipped for it (he directed the cult favorite “Fear” with Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon in 1996), this feels perfunctory to what should be the dominant narrative weight of this film, which is married life between Christian and Ana. Marriage seems to bring out the worst in Christian, and it’s here where I feel like the film, and adaptation by James’s husband (Niall Leonard), really struggles, because it reverses a lot of the growth Christian seemed to show in “Darker.” We see him tell her to keep her bikini top on at a French beach where people are nude sunbathing, and while you understand the tabloid angle he tries to convince her with (he IS Christian Gray, after all), it’s also impossible to not see it as controlling behavior par for the course that would, in real life, be a red flag for a woman. After Ana takes a liberty with his security concerns for her (she has personal security that answers to him) to get some drinks with best friend Kate (Eloise Mumford), he punishes her in the red room in a way that borders on sexual assault, undercutting any sexual heat the scene is supposed to have. Christian hasn’t appeared to learn a thing from Ana, and that’s kind of a bummer for someone who has somewhat enjoyed what this franchise has had to offer, and feels like the movies have done as well as they could do with this problematic material. “Freed” has some of the most problematic material of the series, and it also feels like a two types of movies bumping into one another, unable to decide what it wants to be.
I’m grateful this franchise is over, even though I know, because of my wife, I’ll probably watch them again. I haven’t disliked it like other critics have (Dakota Johnson makes the whole thing watchable), but it definitely has felt much ado about nothing, in the grand scheme of things. The narrative isn’t worthy of three films, and honestly, if it had just been “Fifty Shades of Gray,” and the sequels didn’t exist, I think it would have been better. The sex in the film lost a lot of heat after the first film, although the second and third films had their moments. The music for the films fell of a cliff in terms of quality after the first film- Danny Elfman always did good work, but the song soundtrack in the first film was better than the results of the soundtracks for “Darker” and “Freed” combined. The books took a lot of heat for not understanding true BDSM relationships that I feel like the movies have avoided, but the movies still show some red flags about emotionally abusive relationships; it’s hard to say that Christian and Ana have genuine love in this film, let alone a healthy relationship, but I think the films (especially the first two) might have sanded some of those rough edges off. If some people lament the ending of this franchise, I get it, and all I can say is, there’s other interesting erotic fish out in a sea that is polluted with a LOT of shit. My advice? Start with Luis Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour,” which I think will speak to you in much the same way James’s books did, and move from there; I’d probably go to Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” or the 1998 costume drama, “Dangerous Beauty,” and let those guide you. Erotic cinema is more than just soft core porn, and, if you look in the right places, can give you a good charge of sensual excitement by playing to your fantasies. If “Fifty Shades” inspires people to find out films like those I’ve mentioned, it’s not a terrible thing for people’s moviewatching lives.
