"The Notorious Bettie Page"

This tender look at the life of Bettie Page -- played by a fearless, gorgeous Gretchen Mol -- gets intimate without demystifying the pinup icon.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, 50s, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Mary Harron

April 13, 2006 | There are so many Bettie Pages that, in telling the story of Page's life -- or even just one version of that story -- it must be hard for a filmmaker to be sure she's got the right woman. There's Bettie in a scanty black bathing suit, her breasts outlined by wreaths of daisies; Bettie in a spontaneous holiday snap, dressed in clam diggers and a cotton blouse, the very same uniform our own moms and grandmothers might have worn on casual summer days; Bettie in a black corset and patent-leather platforms not made for walking, trussed in contortions so elaborate that it would take a Boy Scout to figure out how to undo the strings. (I've always wondered if the most elaborate bondage knots weren't invented by former Boy Scouts.)

Bettie Page is a person we know only from photographs: After becoming the most famous and beloved pinup model of the 1950s, she left the profession suddenly and disappeared almost entirely, leading a quiet (though often very troubled) life as a devout Christian. Although some people never forgot Bettie, she reemerged as a cult figure in the late '80s, perhaps partly because Third Wave feminists were less uptight about the pinup aesthetic than their forebears had been.

But there's an even broader explanation for her reemergence: The obvious sexual frisson of her pictures aside, it's very hard for anyone to actively dislike Bettie Page. Her short, dark bangs may have been her trademark, but her incandescent smile was just as much of a calling card. A camera subject of nearly supernatural charm, she welcomed the male gaze only to playfully melt it into a pile of helpless neutrons. The many pictures she's given us show a woman of supreme self-possession, one who took pleasure in facing the camera lens squarely. There was never any danger that the camera, or even the guys who would ultimately ogle the pictures, could take anything away from her.

Mary Harron's deeply affectionate and subversively brainy "The Notorious Bettie Page" humanizes Page without demystifying her. Harron and her star, the astonishing Gretchen Mol, understand that we don't want our Bettie Page to be demystified: There may be some literal-minded purists who'll complain that Harron doesn't address the hardships Page faced in later life (including some mental-health problems that required her to be institutionalized for a time). But Harron's approach shows respect for the mirror figures of the mythical Bettie Page, the one we know so well from the treasure trove of pictures she's left for us to enjoy, and the real one, who, now in her 80s, lives quietly in Southern California. Harron's movie asks, and answers, the question of what the camera can tell us about a life. As one of Page's photographers, Bunny Yeager (played by Sarah Paulson), says in the movie -- and as Yeager has said in real life -- "When she's nude, she doesn't seem naked." Bettie Page's spirit transcends traditional feminist ideology, cutting straight past perceived ideas of how women should or shouldn't pander to men's sexual appetites. Her pictures are so elemental, so lacking in guile, that they often seem to be less "about" sex than about a pure state of being -- maybe even a state of grace. No wonder Page, even long after she left modeling and became deeply religious, never denounced her past. Mol's Bettie explains, "I'm not ashamed. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden. When they sinned, they put on clothes."

"The Notorious Bettie Page" -- which was written by Harron and Guinevere Turner, the writer, producer and star of the 1992 film "Go Fish" -- maps a landscape of joy and pleasure in the face of prudery and repression. The picture was shot by Mott Hupfel, largely in lush black-and-white, but in certain sections it bursts into color, like a tropical flower.

Page didn't have an easy life: She was sexually abused by her father (a fact the movie delicately alludes to, without milking the young Page's suffering for dramatic effect), and as a young woman was the victim of a gang rape. Harron doesn't soft-pedal the unhappier aspects of Page's early life, but she doesn't treat them as glaring signposts either, maybe because Page herself never did. The movie gives a clear picture of Page's early years while being careful not to suggest any clear-cut cause and effect. Page, born in Nashville, just missed out on being valedictorian of her high school class (she skipped an art class), and lost a valuable scholarship because of it. She attended teachers college and married young (the marriage ended in divorce), later moving to New York City. After being discovered by an amateur photographer, she began posing for clubs made up of hobbyist shutterbugs, who had a blast snapping pictures of Bettie clad in relatively chaste bathing costumes: As Bettie, Mol prances and mugs for the camera, clearly suggesting that Bettie treated the whole thing as a frolic, and not as exploitation. That isn't hard to comprehend: These camera clubs were made up of nerdy guys who were, of course, completely happy to be in the company of a skimpily clad woman, but who'd be reprimanded if they so much as grazed her ankle while describing how they wanted her to pose.

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