Pornography of the 1950s looks quaint by today’s … um, we can’t exactly call them standards, can we? But you know what I mean.
Except, perhaps, for the still alluring work of Bettie Page. A busty brunette who posed for then-taboo full-frontal photos, modeled fetish getups and made slap-and-tickle all-girl stag films, Page remains to this day a venerated cult figure in certain circles. The most highly paid contemporary porn stars aren’t any sexier.
But even though she exposed herself like no other woman of her time, Page retains an air of unknowability. Still alive but semi-reclusive, she has refused to have her picture taken for many years, and that’s only added to her mystique.
And while the new biopic “The Notorious Bettie Page” bends over as backward as some of its subject’s most gymnastic poses to make the fantasy figure seem approachable, it really doesn’t tell us a lot about who she actually may have been.
This doesn’t seem to be a failure on the parts of director Mary Harron and her screenwriting partner, Guinevere Turner, who last brought us the wittily subversive adaptation of “American Psycho.” It’s more like they purposely wanted to keep the movie – which, after all, touches on such dark subjects as spousal abuse, gang rape and government censorship – psychologically superficial. Not unlike pornography, in its way, only with a cheeky undercurrent of cultural criticism from a whip-smart, feminist perspective.
As for the icon herself, Gretchen Mol looks improbably accurate (the lithe, fair-featured actress and Page don’t really resemble one another at all), exhibits no fear (while showing everything else) and creates an utterly beguiling personality (to the extent that it’s been written for her, anyway). It’s a great performance for one designed with very little going on inside – and far and away Mol’s best screen work to date.
A smart, Bible-believing Tennessee gal, Page ended up in New York City in the early ’50s with dreams of becoming an actress. Despite traumatic past experiences with males, she dubiously maintained a cheerful disposition – according to the movie, anyway – and found much more creative fulfillment posing for “photo club” enthusiasts and the sibling pornographers Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor, often hilarious in their pervy pragmatism) than in the absurd Method acting classes she was taking.
Of course, the ’50s were a time of repression, too, and the Klaws, Page and their pals eventually got hauled before a congressional committee. In a bit of amusing casting irony, David Strathairn, last seen battling Joe McCarthy in the black-and-white “Good Night, and Good Luck,” plays another witch-hunting ’50s senator, Estes Kefauver, in this mostly black-and-white production.
Harron uses splashy color in some sequences, primarily keyed by which old Bettie photos were made at the time of the scene, but also to approximate various looks of the era and evoke a psychological state or emotional mood.
The film concludes soon after Page’s decision, at the end of the decade, to stop showing off the body she was so justifiably and unashamedly proud of and start doing the Lord’s work. It does not go into the broken marriages, violent outbursts and institutionalization that came later in her life. That, of course, would ruin the pretty, lascivious picture the movie is determined to paint, but I’m not sure that’s something Harron deserves criticism for. Certainly, the urge to objectify women that has fueled the porn business since cave-painting times is implicitly teased throughout “The Notorious Bettie Page.” That’s not a bad move for a film that’s explicit about so much else.