‘Fifty Shades Darker’ Borrows an Entire Scene From ‘Working Girl’
Dakota Johnson has inherited her mother Melanie Griffith’s girlish voice and appealing screen presence — and in Fifty Shades Darker, she inherits one of her mother’s best speeches. Partway through the Fifty Shades of Grey sequel, Johnson’s character, Anastasia Steele, has a bit of dialogue lifted wholesale from the end of Working Girl, the 1988 comedy that was Griffith’s big-screen breakout. The scene doesn’t quite work the second time around, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. And if you haven’t seen Working Girl a million times (which you should — it’s on Netflix!), you might miss the reference completely. Here’s a full explanation. [Warning: Minor Fifty Shades Darker plot spoilers ahead.]
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Let’s start with the original. In Working Girl, Griffith plays Tess, a secretary from blue-collar Staten Island who works her way up to an executive position on Wall Street (and snags Harrison Ford in the process), despite the undermining efforts of her duplicitous boss Katharine (Sigourney Weaver). At the end of the film, Tess — who until this point has been Katharine’s secretary — gets a secretary of her own, Alice (Amy Aquino). They have a conversation that goes like this:
Alice: Maybe now would be a good time to go over what you expect of me.
Tess: I expect you to call me Tess. I don’t expect you to fetch me coffee unless you’re getting some for yourself, and the rest we’ll just make up as we go along, okay?
It’s a short but pointed scene, meant to show that Tess will treat her secretary kindly and fairly, unlike Katharine. And that’s probably the intention of Fifty Shades Darker screenwriter Niall Leonard, who quotes Tess’s speech word for word (except for the other woman’s name) in the film. In the new scene, Anastasia has received an unexpected promotion from assistant to editor at a prestigious Seattle publishing firm, after her old boss, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), is fired for sexually harassing her. Hyde’s other assistant, Hannah (Ashleigh LaThrop), suddenly realizes that she now works for Anastasia, and incredulously asks if she should call her “Miss Steele.” Anastasia replies with her mother’s line about the coffee, and Hannah smiles at her benevolent new boss.
So here’s why the Fifty Shades homage doesn’t live up to the original. By the time we see this conversation in Working Girl, we’ve spent the whole movie observing how hard Tess works and how badly she deserves this promotion. She’s earned her status, and the way she talks to her secretary shows that she’ll be a true mentor to other women.
In Fifty Shades, however, Anastasia stumbles into a position that she hasn’t earned, and for which she appears not remotely qualified. Meanwhile, Hannah — who has been in a similar position to Anastasia at the publishing house, but for longer — isn’t even considered for her old boss’s job. To add insult to injury, Hannah appears to be the publisher’s only black employee. Imagine Hannah’s point of view on this: A white girl gets hired to do the job she’s been doing for months if not years, and within weeks, the new girl is her boss. Hannah would be within her rights to walk out the door. The Working Girl speech doesn’t make Anastasia look like a wise mentor; it makes her look clueless and entitled. (Which, for all the charm Johnson brings to the character, she is.)
On the plus side, maybe this weird little tribute will encourage audiences to rediscover Working Girl, a movie that deserves more recognition — and animated GIFs — then it gets. And maybe in Fifty Shades Freed, Anastasia can inform Christian Grey that she has a head for business and a bod for sin.
Watch the cast talk about the sequel’s humor:
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