Reviewed - The Notorious Bettie Page: The screenplay on which writer-director Mary Harron toiled for so long with Guinevere Turner proves to be as scanty as the outfits Page wore in coy fetishist magazines, writes Michael Dwyer.
Introducing The Notorious Bettie Page at the Toronto Film Festival last autumn, writer-director Mary Harron said she had been working on the project for 12 years, during which she produced two children and directed two films, I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho.
A significant disappointment after those edgy, risk-taking movies, Harron's meandering, repetitive new film fails to explain her fascination with its subject, 1950s pin-up model Bettie Page, and the screenplay on which Harron toiled for so long with Guinevere Turner proves to be as scanty as the outfits Page wore in coy fetishist magazines.
Shot mostly in black-and-white with bursts into colour, and interspersed with some archival material, the film opens in 1955 as Page waits to testify before a US Senate pornography investigation instigated by a politician (David Strathairn in a cameo) from her home state of Tennessee. Flashbacks portray Page as a victim of incestuous sexual abuse in childhood, and a physically abusive husband and gang rape in her late teens.
Moving from Nashville to New York with misguided dreams of a movie career, Page falls into an alternative profession as a performer, becoming a minor celebrity as a bondage model for a brother and sister team, Irving and Paula Klaw (Chris Bauer and Lili Taylor). Shattering the traditional image of pornographers, the Klaws are presented as homely, caring folk.
Having been so badly treated by men in her hometown, Page appears remarkably naive about serving as a masturbation fantasy for countless men across the US, expressing the view that if nakedness was good enough for Adam and Eve, well, it's good enough for her. Harron's idealised perspective would have us believe that Page has now taken control over men.
At least the film may have returned some control to Gretchen Mol over her own career, which had foundered in a succession of barely released movies after she featured on a 1998 Vanity Fair cover story setting her up as "Hollywood's Next It Girl". Mol immerses herself in an engaging, heroically uninhibited portrayal of Page, but the sketchy screenplay ensures that her character remains stuck in a limbo somewhere between saint and cipher.
The real-life Bettie Page found religion and quit modelling in 1957. Now 83, she refused to co-operate with Harron's movie.
