Review: The Notorious Bettie Page (2006)

Like most people who have websites, I'm fairly obsessive about checking my site stats--I check how much traffic this small, dark corner of the Internet draws, from whence the traffic comes and what exactly on my site people are visiting most.

The results never fail to surprise, bemuse and confuse me. For example: Do you know what the single most visited page on this blog is? If you guessed that it's any one of my essays on Vanishing Chicago, my account of 9/11 or movie reviews like the one before you now, you'd be wrong. If, on the other hand, you guessed that it was one of my poems, you'd be right--but not because I'm such a brilliant wordsmith.

No, it's because that poem happens to feature, amongst other photos employed to illustrate verses, a shot of '50s pinup model Bettie Page.

I came late to the cult that swirls around Bettie Page. It was 1990, and I was in a comic shop--don't ask me which one, because I don't remember--when I saw a small magazine called Bettie Being Bad, which consisted of a three-part essay by longtime comic-book production man John Workman that spoke of pop culture in general and, in particular, Page's place in it and impact on it, and numerous (if poorly reproduced) photographs of the woman herself. I recognized the face--comic book writer/artist Dave Stevens had used her visage for the girlfriend of the lead character in The Rocketeer--and thought, "Wait...she was real?"

Workman's essay was an eloquent, thought-provoking piece, to be sure, but that wasn't why I bought Bettie Being Bad. I bought it (and still have it to this day) for the same reason many men (and more than a few women) have purchased magazines, books, comics, paintings and sculptures of her over the decades since she vanished from sight (until she resurfaced several years ago, perfectly willing to talk about her days as a model, but not to be photographed again).

There was something about her, an intermingling of sexuality and playfulness--sure, she was posing naked much of the time and looked damned fine doing it, but more than that, she looked like she was having fun doing it--that made Bettie Page more alluring and less intimidating than any of her contemporaries. And the number of hits that photo of Bettie on this site gets attests to her continuing popularity, nearly 50 years after she last posed.

That popularity may explain why, after so much time, we have a big-screen biography in The Notorious Bettie Page--a title which, perhaps intentionally, comes off as ironic, given the downright tame way director Mary Harron and cowriter Guinevere Turner approach their subject. If it weren't for the occasional nudity, this could easily have been a made-for-TV movie (and maybe The Notorious Bettie Page really was one at one point--it was produced by HBO).

The story Harron and Turner tell is relatively straightforward: Page (Gretchen Mol) has a rough early life (sexual abuse at home is implied; gang rape is outright stated, though not shown), just misses making valedictorian of her high school class and marries young to an abusive lout, all before she moves to New York and tries her hand at acting. There, she is invited to pose for "photo clubs"--gatherings of men and women with cameras who like to take pictures of girls in lingerie. Once Page steps in front of the photographers, she truly comes to life, and she winds up doing fetish shoots for Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer) and his sister, Paula (Lili Taylor, in a funny supporting performance), which leads to some unwanted attention from Congress in the form of hearings conducted by Estes Kefauver (David Straithairn, wasted in a tiny role) .

Eventually, though, Page rethinks her career choice and gives her life over to religion. (There is no mention of Page's later mental breakdowns or subsequent revival as a pop-culture icon.)

What makes The Notorious Bettie Page more interesting than the average biopic is the visual approach Harron and company take: Much of the movie is shot in crisp black and white, with later scenes set in Florida suddenly bursting into postcard-vibrant color, making for a movie that is at least never dull to look at.

Then there's Mol's performance in the title role. More than merely matching Bettie Page's look (both in and out of clothing), Mol captures the spirit of Page. When she takes all of her clothing off in front of the camera for the very first time, her smile, her eyes, the language of her body all express the ecstacy born of absolute, uninhibited freedom that I saw in those photos reprinted in Bettie Being Bad more than a decade and a half ago. But Mol also gets across Page's intelligence--she may have made her living taking her clothes off, but that didn't make her stupid or vacant, and Mol shows in small glances and gestures Page's growing discontentment with how she's perceived. It's a remarkably subtle performance worthy of Oscar consideration, though it's unlikely that the Academy would ever take either the actress or the subject of her performance that seriously.

That's no surprise. Maybe it's even just about right. The cool kids always "got" Bettie Page, and wherever she is today, she knows she was (and is) appreciated well beyond what she would have expected of her "posin'." The Notorious Bettie Page may not be an in-depth analysis of Page or her place in history, but it's certainly an respectful appreciation of the woman and her work. And considering how well-remembered most models of that era are--i.e., not at all--maybe that's enough.