May 12, 2006 | There’s something at once beguilingly sweet and teasingly elusive about the soft-core superstar portrayed in The Notorious Bettie Page, writer-director Mary Harron’s thoroughly engrossing and scrupulously nonjudgmental account of the uniquely appealing Nashville-born pinup girl.
Taking her cue from the ‘50s cheesecake photos and fetishist films that have made her subject an enduring cult figure, Harron gives us a Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol) who remains wholesomely perky while proudly naked, and looks far too exhilarated to ever seem exploited. Even while decked out in leather garb in “specialty photos” and S&M shorts for the brother-and-sister team of Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer, Lili Taylor), Bettie undermines the edgy perversity with a hint of wink-wink sauciness, as if to suggest that, hey, she gets the joke, and it’s all in good fun.
It’s also an amusing running gag: Bettie’s photos and films appear positively quaint when compared to contemporary porn, and the Klaws come across as chipper co-owners of a friendly family business. (The customer is always right: When a client asks Bettie to “look very strict,” she complies with a tigress growl.) By ‘50s standards, however, the product of that family business is considered sufficiently dangerous to trigger a Senate investigation chaired by Tennessee’s very own Estes Kefauver (played here by David Strathairn).
Harron and co-scriptwriter Guinevere Turner (who previously teamed for American Psycho) don’t shy away from the darker aspects of Bettie’s early years. (She survives sexual abuse, and an abusive husband, before moving to New York.) But the filmmakers are too savvy to suggest a facile cause-and-effect explanation for Bettie’s later behavior. In the world according to The Notorious Bettie Page, Bettie wasn’t driven by demons or traumatized by her past – she was animated by an exuberance unbound by convention or self-consciousness.
Early on, Bettie casually agrees to doff her bathing suit, and then her bottom, for an amateur “camera club” photographer who can’t believe his good fortune. What he doesn’t understand, of course, is that she’s disrobing to celebrate herself, not to satisfy him. Later, she eagerly portrays the spanker (or the spanked) in S&M photos and films for the Klaws and photographer John Willie (a slyly scene-stealing Jared Harris). But don’t get the wrong idea: Even with a whip in her hand and snarl on her lips, she’s still a good Christian girl at heart. She won’t put up with any potty-mouth talk by Willie. And if he asks how she can reconcile her religious beliefs with her underground career, well, that’s easy: Adam and Eve wore clothes, she pointedly notes, only after they fell from grace.
Gretchen Mol gives a performance of such uninhibited grace and verve that it’s easy to accept the movie’s central conceit of Bettie – the nicely naughty imp with the bright-smiling face framed by severe black bangs -- as innocent and knowing. It helps a lot, to be sure, that Mol always appears at ease in her own skin, bare or clothed. (It’s impossible not to share the sheer joy she expresses when Bettie poses, especially during color sequences that punctuate the black-and-white movie.) It helps even more, though, that Mol, like the movie itself, refuses to answer every question we might have about Bettie.
Ultimately, Bettie returns to her religious roots and is born again, a transformation the movie dramatizes with surprising respect. But she never renounces what she did when she walked on the wild side, and she never condemns her traveling companions on that journey. In short: Bettie never complains, she never explains. She remains a tantalizing enigma, and the movie respects her mystery.
(This review originally appeared in The Nashvile Tennessean.)