Deborah Lipp

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) 5/10
Bettie Page leaves Nashville for New York in the late 1940s and becomes a highly-successful pin-up model, until the Kefauver hearings on pornography in 1955.

The Notorious Bettie Page is an uninteresting film about a fascinating subject, so shame on director and co-writer Mary Harron for refusing to find a story and stick with it.

Is The Notorious Bettie Page a biopic? Is it the story of the pornography industry in the 1940s and 1950s? Is it the story of the way sexuality was suppressed and marginalized in that era? Is it the story of the Kefauver hearings? What’s the focal point here?

Since the movie refuses to decide, we spend a pleasant 90 minutes with Bettie, as portrayed by Gretchen Mol. The problem is that Bettie’s essential quality is that she’s pleasant. She’s chipper about posing in the nude, cheery about posing in five inch heels and bondage gear, smiling about walking into dangerous situations with strangers. Any insight offered into Bettie is incidental and brief. Bad childhood experiences. Bad early marriage. But these things are blipped past, and we never see Bettie integrate the experiences, they’re just dots on a map before she moves on.

Meanwhile, we’ve got the Kefauver hearings, the legal problems of brother and sister porn-producers Irving and Paula Klaw, and a few relationships that Bettie moves in and out of without much focus.

Thing is, any of these would have been terrific subjects for a film, but instead, it’s a light smattering, a bunch of little snacks instead of a meal.