Watched The Notorious Bettie Page last night. Interesting movie, but a very, very uneven one. For much of the film, the narrative amounts to a series of unrelated scenes from Page's life with little connection or meaning. And some of the cinematic techniques are puzzling as well. Most of the film is shot in black and white, while Bettie's magazine covers and scenes in Miami are shot in hyper-saturated color reminiscent of 1960s Technicolor. It's a neat effect, but it comes off as an affectation. There's no real meaning behind it--is color supposed to symbolize Page coming to life? Being happy? That doesn't really jibe. Nor is it clarified by director Mary Harron in the making-of documentary featured on the DVD, when she merely says it was "her vision" to film the sequences that way. Harron and scriptwriter Guinevere Turner also make repeated statements that Page is best known today for her bondage photos, almost dismissing her pinup work as incidental. I have to take issue with this, since apart from serving as the model for Jenny in The Rocketeer, most of mainstream America identifies Page with her cheesecake photos, her Playboy work with Bunny Yeager in particular. In the end, I suspect the filmmakers became fixated with the bondage aspect of Page's career a bit too much to put together a truly substantive account of her life. The tawdry is always an attractive siren song, after all. But the disjointed script come across on the screen as an early draft rather than a finished product.
Yet I liked the film more often than not. Why? Gretchen Mol. I've never had much of an opinion of Mol one way or the other before now, but she outright nails the character of Bettie Page. She looks the part. She slips into the character. Her voice changes. She captures the whimsy and innocence of Page. Nowhere is this driven home more than in her making-of interviews, where, in costume and on the set, Mol talks about the character and role. And she looks and sounds nothing like the character she portrays. The transformation is striking. I was very impressed.
And if anyone ever gets around to making another Rocketeer movie, Mol has my vote for the role of Jenny (no disrespect to Jennifer Connelly intended, of course).
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The black and white scenes all occur before the Keefauver Commission non-appearance. Everything after that is color (as I recall)
ReplyDeleteI don't think so, Scott. Even allowing for the film's very liberal use of flashbacks, her first couple of trips to Miami happen before her chronological arrival at the Keefauver Commission, and her last trip to Miami, and conversion, happens afterward. Her first trip comes when the Klaws shut down their studio for a couple of weeks in hopes of avoiding prosecution. Her second comes after the breakup with her boyfriend/husband (the movie is unclear as to his status--Page was married several times in real life).
ReplyDeleteSo, if you're going by Page's personal timeline, color scenes (including the string of magazine covers) happen both before and after the Commission. If you're going by the movie's narrative, again you have color before and after her non-appearance (the film opens with her waiting out in the hall, so technically there are black and white as well as color scenes following her first, initial appearance.
In all honesty, I just don't think Harron is a very good director on this project. She had a bunch of nifty ideas, but couldn't get them to work.