Shadier: FIFTY SHADES DARKER

The ending of Fifty Shades of Grey really made the picture. Before a finale in which meek Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) firmly turns down the imposing and domineering Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), the movie had been a modestly enjoyable adult drama, a sort of half-sexy, half-preposterous interlude between pretty young people engaging in teasingly revealed sexual exploration between bouts of bland business speak and low-boil rom-com flirting. Ah, but in its final moments it turned what had been a lopsided power dynamic – rich sadist gets off hurting a sweet underling who likes it, but only up to a point – into a loaded denial. He pleads with her to stay. She, having finally realized he liked hurting her more than she liked it and more than her willingness to play along could withstand, says a firm, simple, strong, “No.” It’s the last thing we hear as the elevator doors close on the final cut to black. Because Johnson had been such a fun performer, equally enthusiastic and full of personality in bedroom scenes and barroom conversations alike, she almost single-handedly kept the movie from tipping over into prurient giggling or exploitative leering, especially with Dornan’s dour wooden display at her side. This final assertion of her control over the situation lent the movie a nice, contained little arc the sequels were bound to trample.

As Fifty Shades Darker begins, Anastasia continues to rebuff Christian’s creepily insistent attempts to get his way back into her life. Alas, as following the dictates of the garbage book that inspired this whole thing demands, she must allow this to happen. If the first film was ultimately about a young woman trying out a relationship with a cold, distant, persnickety man just to see if she could make it work, the second is about that same woman getting pulled back into the relationship just because. If these stories are theoretically about true love, and I suspect that’s the ending we’re angling towards in next year’s supposed finale, it has done a poor job showing it. This installment, directed by James Foley (both a long way, and somehow not, from his better, similarly icy-toned, attractively cast and photographed 90’s thrillers Fear and After Dark, My Sweet), finds the couple trying out a new dynamic, with fewer rules and diminished expectations. She gets a new job. He buys the company. She meets his family. He takes her sailing. Playing out with smooth adult contemporary ballads under the glossy catalogue spread looking montages – people standing around in sweaters, on boats, at masquerade balls, and beside fireplaces – it tries to gin up interest with some workplace drama and Dark Secrets From The Past. At least it allows for the introduction of Kim Basinger, a welcome sight in an all-too-tiny role.

What little attention paid to the central relationship takes their chemistry and compatibility for granted. Even the sex scenes, the most memorable a fully-clothed shower make out session, aren’t as entertaining as the first’s, more actors’ contract negotiation than character development. (That’s really saying something when the original had literal contract negotiation built into the plot mechanics.) It’s like everyone involved suspects this couple’s long-term happiness won’t, or shouldn’t, work out, but are obligated to stand by them and see it through. (I’m sure many of us have been to weddings like that.) Even when we learn Christian is not just a dominant lover, but also a bit of a burgeoning cult leader – an ex (Bella Heathcote) still falls submissive before his meekest gestures, like she’s still under his spell – the weird sense of inevitable True Love pulls at the main couple. But why would the movie insist watching the funny, bookish, charming young woman continue to be drawn back into the world of this clearly unwell, closed-off, stone-faced billionaire is a route to a happy ending? It tries to be both a romance and a modern Gothic mystery (the question simmering underneath: what’s the deep darkness at the heart of family Grey?), but the latter continually turns the former far more sinister than intended.

And yet, why, then, does the movie give off the dull, consistent feeling of moderate surface pleasure? Perhaps it is because Johnson’s tremulous, dancing, sparkling line readings pirouette off the clunky dialogue (scripted by author E.L. James’ husband) and Foley’s use of competent cold grey photography is seductive Hollywood sheen. And even when I was baffled by the plot’s direction – and by how little actually happens – I was tickled enough by the splashes of melodrama – a drink thrown in a woman’s face at a fancy party! improbable publishing office politics! a random helicopter accident thrown in to gin up false suspense before the movie’s narrative totally flatlines! – to get carried along in its dumb gloss. It’s an empty-headed diversion, as silky a nothing as the original Zayn/Taylor Swift duet that twice slickly slides in one ear and out the other on the soundtrack. These are hardly the best reasons to recommend a movie. And, sure, it’s the sort of faux-transgressive that, say, The Handmaiden’s silver bells would make blush. But I was moderately entertained by this low-key mind-numbing polish.

Fanning the Flames: THE NEON DEMON

We’ve heard of Hollywood chewing people up and spitting them out, but Nicolas Winding Refn thinks he’s found a new spin on the old metaphor in The Neon Demon. Hardly the first story of showbiz’s capacity to lure new talent with false promise, Refn follows a pretty 16-year-old girl (Elle Fanning) freshly arrived in Los Angeles ready to make her way in the modeling business. A coldly calculating agent (Christina Hendricks laying down a fine layer of ice in her one scene) tells her to lie about her age (19, because “people believe what they’re told”) and books her a shoot with an intense famous photographer (Desmond Harrington). That’s just the start of a skeevy journey up the ladder as she draws jealous attention from all the older models (like Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee), lamenting their advanced age (mostly mid-20s, but some are pushing, horror of horrors, thirty) and staring at her with daggers in their eyes. If looks could kill, they’d tear her apart limb by limb and steal back the work that’s always flowing to the younger, the newer, and the more exploitable.

Per usual, Refn’s shallow approach is one of moody synths and long, brooding silences punctuated by staccato bursts of dialogue traded like hot barbs in flat tones. Sometimes this works for him, like the dreamy artsy cars-and-gore Drive, transcending its trappings to become a slick, woozy, romantic and muscular homage to Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Other times this fails him, like the gross and gaudy Only God Forgives, a pointless exercise in masculine posturing and blacklight set design. Neon Demon is the midpoint between those earlier efforts, bringing a swirling generalized menace to the long passages of driving electronic music and pulsing strobe lights, fussily composed frames – Natasha Braier’s coldly sensuous cinematography splayed out with high gloss, like fashion spreads – capturing the entrapment of beautiful women in uncomfortable positions. It effectively communicates the danger inherent for a young person lost in the lower rungs of the entertainment business, trading her looks for a chance at stability.

Refn isn’t a particularly original or deep thinker on the topics at hand. Any insight the film has stops with simple statements like a model coolly reporting “Anything worth having hurts a little” or a casually dismissive designer’s snap, “Beauty isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” So what we’re left with is a simplistic and repetitive exploration of tired old themes. Refn, with co-writers Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, keep the plot agonizingly flat. When not befriended by a nice guy (Karl Glusman) or a seemingly helpful makeup artist (Jena Malone), Fanning poses and reacts in sequences that find her surrounded by predators, sized up as meat and flesh, objectified, commodified, and exploited. There are the agents, photographers, competitors, men. Even a big cat somehow appears in her cheap motel room one night in a sequence of surreal dread that almost seems like it must’ve been a dream until someone casually mentions it several scenes later. But none of these moments or characters have any life to them. They remain slickly photographed, but empty and uncharacterized. Who are these people? What do they want? Where do they come from? What are their inner lives? It’s hard to say.

The movie’s derivative images (from Lynch, Argento, Kubrick, and a host of directors from the avant-garde and music video worlds) turn on conventional themes of greed, envy, and the lengths people will go to become famous and stay young and beautiful. But it acts like that’s enough. It’s totally fascinated with itself, an L.A. commentary made up entirely of clichés, and a style made up entirely of posturing, grooving on its own pulsating aura of unease and meticulous design. It’s also a dispatch from nowhere, hermetically sealed with no relation, real or metaphorical, to reality. Refn envisions its showbiz world as empty and depopulated. There are hardly any extras, and the only way we know Fanning is moving up in the fashion world is that a character tells us. The whole industry seems to be made up of our cast, and doesn’t extend past the bounds of any given frame. The only spark of life is Keanu Reeves, doing great, intriguing work in a couple scenes as a sleazy motel owner. He’s given a Movie Star entrance, and digs into his character-actor role as if he’s walking out of another, better version of this movie.

The Neon Demon visualizes its tired observations from a stylish remove, passing itself off as profound when it’s just played out. The endeavor is merely an exercise in animating its sparse ideas through a slow molasses drip of art house trances goosed with a dried-out straight-faced camp quality and a few effective horror movie excesses. A scene of a murder heard through the walls – or is it another nightmare half-realized? – has surreal chill. And the movie builds to making a spectacle of itself in its final scenes for a long-delayed payoff with ostentatiously preposterous, half-motivated, and grotesquely self-amused violence and gross-out appeal. A corpse post-autopsy is given a sort of spit shine, a nice girl’s fate is as the red mist in a softcore shower of blood on two others, and a climactic eyeball gag is at once horrible and hilariously audacious. By that point the movie has spilled over into the heights of its ridiculousness, surprising and gratuitous, one of those movies that wants to finger-wag society’s desire for flesh and blood while also relishing the opportunity to stage some and lick it all up. I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s like a small, nasty, pseudo-smart splatter picture stretched out to the point of self-serious tedium.

Sense and Stupidity: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES

Did anyone really read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I guess I’d always assumed Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 mashup of Jane Austen’s classic book with zombie schlock was a gag gift at best, built for a quick smirk at the title the first few times one saw it, but destined for remainder bins and yard sale stacks. Now it’s a movie, so I guess someone had to get around to cracking the spine. I was surprised to find that its Hollywood incarnation has been made by filmmakers who have taken its premise rather seriously. The title makes it sound like a joke, but in practice it is both a Regency zombie movie hobbled by an overreliance on Austen’s novel’s structure, and a passably earnest Austen adaptation constantly interrupted by lowest Comic-Con denominator brain-munching action. What an odd mix. Odder still is that writer-director Burr Steers almost gets away with it.

I suspect it’s far too much zombie for Austen fans and far too much Austen for zombie fans. It is possible, though, that you might be like me and sit closer to the middle of that particular Venn diagram, in which case you might find some small diversion here. After all, what with most Austen novels having been adapted several times over, and Pride and Prejudice in particular getting at least two essentially perfect cinematic expressions (last in 2005, from Joe Wright), and the modern zombie Romero-knockoff apocalypse now a walking dead subgenre, it’s worth indulging an experiment in trying something new. I’m all for period-piece monster movies and reimagined classic literature, and everyone involved in this particular idea seems reasonably committed to seeing it through. But this high-concept blending serves to slowly eat away at both halves of its genre mashup.

The story of the Bennet sisters and their mother’s desire to marry them off loses a good deal of sociological fascination when the war is not with France but with the undead, and the young ladies are not merely a reflection of 19th century English mores but are trained in the art of fighting zombies. (They're treated like classic lit pinups in the process.) We see Elizabeth (Lily James, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella) and her sisters (including Dark Shadows’ Bella Heathcote and Insurgent’s Suki Waterhouse) cleaning guns and sharpening blades, tucking them in leather holsters under their skirts. They’re combat ready. But a story of zombie destruction loses a great deal of urgency when so much narrative space is given over to the relationship dynamics and developments Pride and Prejudice’s narrative of romantic negotiations requires.

All this straight-faced seriousness makes for an often monotonous film, balanced between loud bloody jumpy horror violence and tony emotional appeals. It’s a Pride and Prejudice from an alternate universe. As Elizabeth Bennet, James, who is constantly shot to show off cleavage just about heaving out of her dresses, nearly makes her emotional journey work in the midst of this nonsense. The movie’s cleverest moments come from literalizing Elizabeth’s verbal sparring by turning it into actual combat. There is a Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley), a clenched, standoffish rich bachelor whose heart is destined to melt for her. This time he’s an expert zombie hunter in a leather tailcoat. Other suitors include the usual: a sincere young Mr. Bingley (Douglas Booth), a proud George Wickham (Jack Huston), and a comic relief Parson Collins (Matt Smith, pretty funny, too). And Lady Catherine (Lena Headey) is also a zombie slayer, wearing an ominous eyepatch and sporting two swords.

The result is neither a successful Austen adaptation nor a satisfying zombie story, the inclusion of each a detraction from the other. But however poor the fit, it mostly held my interest as I watched Steers – whose past work with high concepts has gone both surprisingly right (17 Again) and horribly wrong (Charlie St. Cloud) – and crew keep the film’s central disjunction from tipping over into camp. The cast acts like they’re in a serious literary adaptation, and Remi Adefarasin (also cinematographer on handsome British historical dramas like Elizabeth: The Golden Age) shoots glossy period detail, old buildings, and beautiful green fields without a wink. But then, shambling hordes of undead drip into the frame and it’s back to the decapitations and shots to the head that the horror crowd wants to see.

The idea of putting a zombie movie in a historical setting is a clever one, and the Regency period, so rich with literary and cinematic antecedents is as good as any. It enlivens the old tropes somewhat to see them enacted by people in period costume and preoccupied with centuries old concerns. But this potential glimmer of inspiration is largely squandered as the movie slowly loses energy to its plodding plot. If you’re going to make such a mashup, why not cut loose from the source materials and let the imagination run wild? Instead, it sticks awfully close to zombie clichés and the structure of Austen’s original story. Still, Steers’ film may very well be the best one could do with such an inherently broken premise. It’s a swing and a miss, a dumb idea done blandly. I just wish they hadn’t dragged Pride and Prejudice into this, though it’s at least more respectful of it than Mark Twain, who wrote, “Everytime I read [it] I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Now there’s an idea for a literary zombie movie.

Barnabas A.D. 1972: DARK SHADOWS

Running for over 1,000 episodes in the late 60s and early 70s, Dark Shadows was a supernatural soap opera about a vampire and his mortal descendents living in a big spooky house on the coast of Maine. The slapdash but committed show has a devoted cult following, the members running the gamut from scary earnest to entirely ironic. It’s easy to imagine that director Tim Burton falls somewhere in the middle. His films have always had a sly approach to the supernatural and a baroque gothic style that suits itself nicely to deathly serious, but deeply cracked, tales of smirking dark fantasy.

Now Burton (surely one of the few working auteurs who is a recognizable brand to the general public) and author Seth Grahame-Smith (his novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has been turned into a big studio release for later this summer) have adapted the show into a feature film. I have no idea how accurately the show’s tone and content have been adapted – I simply haven’t had the time nor the inclination to give it much of a go – but what is clear is that Burton has created a sumptuously imagined film that builds its own crooked world out of a variety of influences. It plays like a Hammer horror film, specifically one of Christopher Lee’s Dracula pictures – he, Lee, not Dracula, has a cameo here – filtered through an American gothic (with additional shades of Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”), all told in a groovy half-camp Burton style.

The story starts in the 1700s when the family Collins leaves Liverpool and sails for Maine. There, the family establishes the seaside town of Collinsport on the back of a productive fishing business. A big beautiful mansion is built and all seems well. But young Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp, of course) spurns the attentions of a servant girl (Eva Green) who turns out to be a witch. And so she puts the Collins family under her devious curses. She conjures a situation that kills Barnabas’s parents and later, her broken heart still smoldering, puts Barnabas’s fiancé (Bella Heathcote, big-eyed and pale) into a trance and forces her to walk off the edge of a cliff. To top it all off, the angry witch turns Barnabas into a vampire, which adds layers of whitish-grey makeup to his face and hands. (When he feeds, bright red dribbles of blood dot either side of his lower lip in a clear reference to Christopher Lee’s vampiric look.) She turns the town against him, and watches as the angry mob locks him in a coffin and buries him deep.

The plot picks up in an exquisitely detailed and beautifully heightened 1972, filled up with period fashions and super-cool vintage music cues to set the mood. (And Lee’s Dracula A.D. 1972 is playing at Collinsport’s downtown theater, a nice touch.) The Collins remain a cursed family. Their fishery is shuttered and the remaining family members are cooped up in the cavernous mansion: the matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer), her surly teen daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) and his troubled son (Gulliver McGrath). Also on hand are the alcoholic groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley), the new nanny (Bella Heathcote again, some nice visual foreshadowing), and the youngest Collins’s boozy, tragically vain child psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter). This is a wonderfully droll cast giving terrific performances that underplay the oddities and eccentricities of the family’s life, which only enhances the hilarious gags and heightened tones. A couple of early dining room scenes have some of the same pacing and likable snap of similar moments in Burton’s Beetlejuice. Also like that film, this one soon becomes a movie in which an odd outsider shakes up the routine of an eccentric family in surprising, supernatural ways.

When construction workers dig up Barnabas’s coffin, they awaken a deadly fish-out-of-water movie as this long-lost relative stumbles back into town and, despite befuddlement on his part and confusion on theirs, wants to help his skeptical kin regain control of the town’s fishing empire. It’s a quest made all the more urgent when the porcelain-skinned C.E.O. of the rival fish company turns out to be none other than the same immortal witch who cursed him two centuries prior. Theirs is a twisted love affair, less love-hate, more she loves-and-hates, he mostly just hates. She’s an exuberantly frisky kind of evil; he’s just puzzled by his surroundings and only wants what’s best for his family and would very much like her out of the way. It’s a juicy hook, for sure, but with all of these other characters interacting with Barnabas as well, and each with their own little subplots of varying importance, the movie’s biggest flaw is its overstuffed qualities.

The movie is overflowing with plot and character in ways that obfuscate a strong central interest, making the whole thing lumpy and often without momentum. What are we supposed to think about Barnabas, a good man and a cursed man who is at once a source of humor and a scary monster? He’s the butt of culture clash jokes, but he also kills (no spoilers) some characters who are quite likable and hardly wholly villainous. The film’s never quite sure what to do with him and if Depp knows, and I suspect he might, he isn’t given the chance to let us in. That leaves this main thread curiously unresolved. But the other characters wander in and out of the film as well, moving in and out of focus. Some go missing for long stretches of time, even ones that are so very prominent to emotional beats of the overarching narrative. Still, I shrugged off such nagging thoughts rather easily, filing them away as an unsuccessful attempt at feature-length homage to soap opera plotting.

Besides, this is a movie with characters that are just plain fun to be around and with a style to luxuriate in. Burton, with the great French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, films it all with a colorful style, genre piece as groovy period piece. Here’s a movie rich in atmospherics both comic and mildly frightening, dripping with a great sense of visual play. I particularly liked a scene in which a person gets their blood sucked while they’re in the middle of getting a blood transfusion. Burton leaves the I.V. bag in the foreground as it slowly then suddenly crumples in on itself like a used juice box.

Some have found Burton’s use of computer-driven effects in recent years to be excessive and, oddly enough, a limit on his imagination. Fair enough, if we’re talking about his Alice in Wonderland, which, aside from a few nice touches, felt more like a generic movie he was hired to coat in a Burton gloss. To me, Sweeney Todd and, to a lesser extent, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feel just as wonderful as, though certainly different from, his earlier, more tactile, effects work. With Dark Shadows he shows admirable restraint, so that by the time the effects hit the fan, it’s a natural outgrowth of the satisfying strangeness that’s come before, spectacle that’s been very well earned. It’s a film that wears its darkness lightly and falls into a satisfyingly funky groove.