"The Notorious Bettie Page"

"The Notorious Bettie Page" is a true feminist movie, but one that avoids cant and facile theories about victimization. Harron and Turner find a great deal of friendly good humor in the Bettie Page story, and Harron has framed that story beautifully: When Bettie first shows up at the studios of Irving and Paula Klaw, the brother-and-sister team who specialized in fetish and bondage photos for a specialized audience (they're played here, marvelously, by Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor), Irving waves Bettie and another model past the leather costumes and riding crops and urges them to have some lunch: "You hungry? We got some sandwiches over there." And Paula, before, during and after these rather unorthodox (but totally goofy) photo sessions, flutters around Bettie with obvious protectiveness: In her tailored blouses and jangly charm bracelets, she's a sophisticated rockabilly den mom. Even legendary fetishist photographer and illustrator John Willie, played by the superbly scruffy Jared Harris, comes off as a human being and not a caricature. At one point during a bondage session, he removes a gag from Bettie's mouth when she begins to show obvious distress -- not because she feels discomfort in this outlandish gear, but because Willie is singing a song with dirty lyrics that troubles her. They end up in a casual theological discussion about the nature of God and what he wants for us on this earth.

In the mid-'50s, the Klaws came under the scrutiny of Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn, in a very un-Edward R. Murrow role), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. (The investigation ultimately destroyed the Klaws' business.) In one scene, a grieving father testifies, telling how he found his son -- a former Boy Scout, incidentally -- dead, tied up in a position that he was certain had been inspired by pornographic material.

Harron dramatizes the hearings in a way that doesn't make them seem antiquated or corny. While most of us feel comfortable with the cheesecake erotica Bettie Page posed for, including the mostly lighthearted bondage photos, "The Notorious Bettie Page" subtly makes the point that even today, we're not wholly accepting of the idea of pornography. While most Americans of a liberal bent claim to support free speech, it's astonishing how many people still show suspicion about pornography. Last year Pamela Paul, in her book "Pornified," claimed that use of pornography "causes" men to become detached from and indifferent to their woman partners. Is that so different from a father claiming that a picture inspired his son to a level of kink that ultimately killed him? Harron doesn't allow us to comfortably distance ourselves from that distinction. She doesn't make that man's naiveté a mere relic of the repressive '50s.

Even though we may now see Bettie Page as a relatively tame figure, the movie never underestimates her fearlessness. And Harron has found a correspondingly fearless actor in Gretchen Mol. In one of the movie's pivotal scenes, Bettie poses for one of the young club members, in a sunny, secluded park. She stands among the leafy trees, a goddess of muscles and curves, turning this way and that so her friend can capture her at her best. It's fitting that '50s jazz -- from the silkworm slinkiness of Art Pepper to the comma-laden extended phrases of Clifford Brown and Max Roach -- figures prominently on the soundtrack to "The Notorious Bettie Page." As Mol plays her, Bettie is completely in the moment when she's in front of the lens: More than just a woman who knew how to stand or smile, she's the music behind the pictures.

In this scene, Bettie is having so much fun that she suggests to the photographer that she's willing to take off her bathing-suit top. It is, after all, just a little piece of fabric. The photographer, who can't believe his luck, says, "Why not?" Then Bettie takes her bottoms off too, exposing everything. The photographer, just as nervous as he is delighted, explains that she'll have to stand in such a way that she won't expose that -- the notion of immodesty (or illegality) hasn't even occurred to her.

Mol plays the scene with such openness that I gasped out loud: Like Page herself, she was nude, and yet she didn't seem naked. For a split second, before I fully registered what I was seeing, I simply believed I was looking at a garden-variety fabulous-looking woman, only without clothes -- as if that were the sort of thing that happens every day of my life.

But I still haven't quite plumbed the multiple layers of what Mol is doing here: She plays Bettie's lack of self-consciousness with the kind of boldness that you rarely see in young actresses these days. In a world where many actresses still won't do a sex scene without the protection of an artfully draped sheet, Mol holds nothing back, emotionally or physically.

Next page: Bettie in the Garden of Eden