May 12, 2006<\/span> |<\/strong>\u00a0There\u2019s something at once beguilingly sweet and teasingly elusive about the soft-core superstar portrayed in The Notorious Bettie Page<\/em>, writer-director Mary Harron\u2019s thoroughly engrossing and scrupulously nonjudgmental account of the uniquely appealing Nashville-born pinup girl.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Taking her cue from the \u201850s 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 \u201cspecialty photos\u201d 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\u2019s all in good fun.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s also an amusing running gag: Bettie\u2019s 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 \u201clook very strict,\u201d she complies with a tigress growl.) By \u201850s standards, however, the product of that family business is considered sufficiently dangerous to trigger a Senate investigation chaired by Tennessee\u2019s very own Estes Kefauver (played here by David Strathairn). Early on, Bettie casually agrees to doff her bathing suit, and then her bottom, for an amateur \u201ccamera club\u201d photographer who can\u2019t believe his good fortune. What he doesn\u2019t understand, of course, is that she\u2019s 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\u2019t get the wrong idea: Even with a whip in her hand and snarl on her lips, she\u2019s still a good Christian girl at heart. She won\u2019t 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\u2019s easy: Adam and Eve wore clothes, she pointedly notes, only after <\/em>they fell from grace.<\/span><\/p>\n Gretchen Mol gives a performance of such uninhibited grace and verve that it\u2019s easy to accept the movie\u2019s central conceit of Bettie \u2013 the nicely naughty imp with the bright-smiling face framed by severe black bangs — as innocent and <\/em>knowing. It helps a lot, to be sure, that Mol always appears at ease in her own skin, bare or clothed. (It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n (This review originally appeared in The Nashvile Tennessean<\/em>.)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/body><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May 12, 2006 |\u00a0There\u2019s something at once beguilingly sweet and teasingly elusive about the soft-core superstar portrayed in The Notorious Bettie Page, writer-director Mary Harron\u2019s thoroughly engrossing and scrupulously nonjudgmental…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-8589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives","tag-archives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nHarron and co-scriptwriter Guinevere Turner (who previously teamed for American Psycho<\/em>) don\u2019t shy away from the darker aspects of Bettie\u2019s 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\u2019s later behavior. In the world according to The Notorious Bettie Page<\/em>, Bettie wasn\u2019t driven by demons or traumatized by her past \u2013 she was animated by an exuberance unbound by convention or self-consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n