film | What a poseur

The story of '50s pin-up icon Bettie Page should constitute a nifty bio-pic, but THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE ain't it. Despite realistic period ambiance — think: a (mostly) black-and-white Far from Heaven — and a confident performance from Gretchen Mol, American Psycho director Mary Harron's dramatization of Page's rise to fame as an inadvertent sex symbol and her subsequent born-again religious awakening feels overall like a Cliffs Notes encapsulation of a supremely intriguing subject: You get a connect-the-dots picture of the big events in Page's life without any psychological depth or motivation, which means that Notorious depicts Page (played as an adult by Mol) as an abused child, a battered wife, and a gang-rape victim, all in a zippy 15 minutes of screen time, and then focuses on her career as a model in the early days of the fetish-titillation trade and her role (or lack thereof, as it turns out) in Estes Kefauver's 1955 senate indecency hearings. Did the sexual trauma affect her? Benumb her to posing with riding crops and ball gags? Beats me. The movie is less about who Page was in her heyday than what happened when she stripped down to her underwear and less.

Briefly a sensation herself before dual 1999 flops (The Thirteenth Floor and Rounders) put the kibosh on her burgeoning it-girl buzz, Moll certainly looks great in the part, and she deftly captures the if-you-say-so nonchalance that permeated Page's vintage Tease-O-Rama clips. If the script by Guinevere Turner (Bloodrayne: ack!) was as convincing or nuanced, Notorious might've clicked. But Turner ultimately doesn't give Mol's Bettie enough to say — she speaks maybe 100 words in the film's first 45 minutes — or do, aside from innocuously smiling as she nakedly cavorts through a procession of Page's cheesecake-iest moments. Ironically and unfortunately, this Bettie Page is as dimensional as a centerfold. D+