The Notorious Bettie Page
rating: 2 out of 4
The entire premise for The Notorious Bettie Page, I'll admit, is a little out of context for me. I'm simply too young for her to have affected my generation. Going in to the film, while other critics chuckled about the dusty Bettie Page mags they still have tucked away in storage somewhere, I didn't even know who Ms. Page was. So maybe the core effect The Notorious Bettie Page is lost on me. But probably not. Director Mary Harron, you see, is locked in a love affair with shock. Her previous filmsparticularly American Psycholive and die mostly through the gasps and wheezes their shock values present. The method works, but sometimes feels paper thin. This time, however, Harron taps an era that was dynamite shock for its time, and dissects it with a thorough hand. This singular shock stretched over 90 minutes is round and dulled and leaves us only with what lies beneath. And as with most Mary Harron films, what lies beneath can easily be discarded.
The film, as you'd guess, is the biopic of Pin-Up Girl of the Universe, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol). We follow Bettie through her adolescence in the South, up until the end of her career as a nudist and infamous fetish model. The ride begins innocently enough, however, with simple bathing suit photography and beach-front posing. But one door leads to another and soon she's strapping on eight-inch stilettos and whipping another girl's bottom.
Playing Bettie Page is the luminous Gretchen Mol. Having never seen a Bettie Page photo before, I can't attest to her authenticity in physique; but I certainly can say that Ms. Mol fits the role written for her in the mostly shapely and curvy of manners. And besides her anatomical advantages, Ms. Mol also does well to employ a supreme naivety to her character. Never once was I skeptical of her childish reasoning that went along with the moral ambiguity of her kink-show modeling career. Her version of Bettie Page is the Southern girl written about in love songs: shyly playful, piously Catholic, not without the syrupy Southern drawl, and--here the stereotype wanders--prancing about in the nude or leather fetish wear.
But besides Bettie, the rest of Notorious' characters flit about in a fringe existence. Most of them work only to drag Bettie closer to her inevitable damnation, while the rest work to huffily tell her otherwise. Beyond this, they're only faces. This wouldn't be so bad if Bettie Page was engaging enough to carry Notorious. But she's instead a predictably tedious naivety that blushingly agrees to every proposal. Just as long as it makes the boys happy, she says. That's what God would want, she thinks. Just as long as she's making people happy. We all know where this leads. The film doesn't stray far from this downward spiral process Bettie wraps herself into, and fails when we realize that the film is only repeating itself with slimier and kinkier occurrences.
On a technical level, Harron lives up to her own notoriety. She hops about between black and white and color, depending on the time period and locale. Miami is vivid with a fuzzily bright palette, while New York slices fedoras with high contrast black and white. The effect is rewarding in that it reminds us of the time period, working to immerse us further into the shock Bettie's creating.
But The Notorious Bettie Page is admittedly flaccid when it comes to its shock factor. I'm willing to concede that those of Ms. Page's generation may relapse into the eye-opening astonishment of the fifties, but for those of us unaware of Bettie Page's reign, Mary Harron's film is just another in a long line of mildly engaging biopics.
rating: 2 out of 4
The entire premise for The Notorious Bettie Page, I'll admit, is a little out of context for me. I'm simply too young for her to have affected my generation. Going in to the film, while other critics chuckled about the dusty Bettie Page mags they still have tucked away in storage somewhere, I didn't even know who Ms. Page was. So maybe the core effect The Notorious Bettie Page is lost on me. But probably not. Director Mary Harron, you see, is locked in a love affair with shock. Her previous filmsparticularly American Psycholive and die mostly through the gasps and wheezes their shock values present. The method works, but sometimes feels paper thin. This time, however, Harron taps an era that was dynamite shock for its time, and dissects it with a thorough hand. This singular shock stretched over 90 minutes is round and dulled and leaves us only with what lies beneath. And as with most Mary Harron films, what lies beneath can easily be discarded.
The film, as you'd guess, is the biopic of Pin-Up Girl of the Universe, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol). We follow Bettie through her adolescence in the South, up until the end of her career as a nudist and infamous fetish model. The ride begins innocently enough, however, with simple bathing suit photography and beach-front posing. But one door leads to another and soon she's strapping on eight-inch stilettos and whipping another girl's bottom.
Playing Bettie Page is the luminous Gretchen Mol. Having never seen a Bettie Page photo before, I can't attest to her authenticity in physique; but I certainly can say that Ms. Mol fits the role written for her in the mostly shapely and curvy of manners. And besides her anatomical advantages, Ms. Mol also does well to employ a supreme naivety to her character. Never once was I skeptical of her childish reasoning that went along with the moral ambiguity of her kink-show modeling career. Her version of Bettie Page is the Southern girl written about in love songs: shyly playful, piously Catholic, not without the syrupy Southern drawl, and--here the stereotype wanders--prancing about in the nude or leather fetish wear.
But besides Bettie, the rest of Notorious' characters flit about in a fringe existence. Most of them work only to drag Bettie closer to her inevitable damnation, while the rest work to huffily tell her otherwise. Beyond this, they're only faces. This wouldn't be so bad if Bettie Page was engaging enough to carry Notorious. But she's instead a predictably tedious naivety that blushingly agrees to every proposal. Just as long as it makes the boys happy, she says. That's what God would want, she thinks. Just as long as she's making people happy. We all know where this leads. The film doesn't stray far from this downward spiral process Bettie wraps herself into, and fails when we realize that the film is only repeating itself with slimier and kinkier occurrences.
On a technical level, Harron lives up to her own notoriety. She hops about between black and white and color, depending on the time period and locale. Miami is vivid with a fuzzily bright palette, while New York slices fedoras with high contrast black and white. The effect is rewarding in that it reminds us of the time period, working to immerse us further into the shock Bettie's creating.
But The Notorious Bettie Page is admittedly flaccid when it comes to its shock factor. I'm willing to concede that those of Ms. Page's generation may relapse into the eye-opening astonishment of the fifties, but for those of us unaware of Bettie Page's reign, Mary Harron's film is just another in a long line of mildly engaging biopics.