Movie Log: The Notorious Bettie Page

The Notorious Bettie Page was the second of the two movies Netflix sent me on Saturday, and I watched it last night. (last night, in this context, means Sunday, October 29 -- ed.)

It's mostly in grainy, faux-old-timey black-and-white, which I found incredibly distracting and a very bad artistic choice. Roger Ebert said something really insightful in his recent review of Marie Antoinette -- that movies about historical figures often portray those people as somehow knowing that they're living in the past, as distancing their stories through a fug of nostalgia, bemusement, and misunderstanding. Bettie Page falls right into that trap; it's clearly a story about "those people back then," and you can't forget that for a second.

The first mistake is the black and white; it's not terribly deep or rich (like the best '30s movies), and the '50s (when the bulk of this movie is set) was not a black and white movie era -- it was the days of Technicolor, of huge widescreen extravaganzas to fight against the incursion of TV (which was black and white).

The second mistake is not having much of a story to tell; this movie is mostly made up of disconnected vignettes (most of which exist to put the fetching and incredibly game Gretchen Mol into a series of re-creations of famous Bettie Page poses) that doesn't really add up to anything. There's a very loose frame story about a late-50s morals investigation that seems to have shut down the Klaws (who the movie presents as Bettie's main source of modeling income), but that disappears for most of the movie. When the movie starts up Bettie's life, it's with a couple of quick scenes about how horrible men were to her -- it's strongly implied she was molested by her father, she's essentially gang-raped, and so on. But the movie doesn't do anything with this material; it's just thrown out (looking old-timey and pseudo-nostalgic, which doesn't help) and then the movie gets on with Bettie's modeling career in New York, which is the core of the movie.

Bettie comes off as a bit of an enigma, and I wonder if the filmmakers had much of an idea of what kind of person she is. The Notorious Bettie Page is a real disappointment; it's more interesting for the titillation factor (Gretchen Mol! Nude!) than for the story the movie tells.