Director Mary Harron Reflects on the Ecstatic, Underrated Notorious Bettie Page
"I don't know, it's always a mystery," Harron (pictured at right) told me this week from Brooklyn, reflecting on The Notorious Bettie Page's tepid reception. "If it had been more of a melodrama, and had more of her suffering, or feeling guilty, or trying to kill herself.... I think people want a biopic to have that trajectory. They want to see Ray writhing on the floor and suffering, and then coming back. But what I really wanted to show the real-life trajectory that a person's life has, that it doesn't have this neat rise and fall."
To that end, Mol's casting is essential to the film's success. You sense she gets it. Harron said finding the right Bettie -- the role calls for unabashed full-frontal nudity, along with some ball-gag scenes -- wasn't easy. Harron saw "many, many people" before Mol, who she'd tried to cast a few years earlier in American Psycho, read for her. "I didn't think she could ever look like Bettie," Harron said. "But she was so fantastic, I never considered anyone else after her. She had the inner Bettie, her playfulness and little-girl-playing dress-ups, her delight in showing herself off. And yet she also had this undercurrent of sadness that was so Bettie. She was perfect for it."
Harron was cognizant of the troubles Page suffered in later life but thought insinuating them into the film artificially would've been a cheat. "Her breakdowns had a lot of root causes -- the rough childhood, the rapes, the Senate hearings," she said. "But to me it was significant that they happened in middle age, when she'd lost her youth and beauty and she'd lost her care. If I'd moved the breakdown up, made it when she was in her thirties, then it would've seemed a direct cause of her doing the bondage photos, and it was many, many years later." The audience for the film, Harron contends, were thus again frustrated by it not meeting their preconceptions about the subject.
But as is, shot in black-and-white with several color sequences that appear taken from once vivid but now sun-bleached postcards, Harron most wanted to convey was that Bettie's experience during the period depicted was happy rather than bleak. She was an innocent who also happened to be the lusted-after "Pin Up Queen Of The Universe." To this end, Harron's favorite scenes, and they're terrific ones, are when Bettie laughingly disrobes in the woods for a stunned photographer and when she's drawn into a Florida church to be born again. "They're ecstatic scenes," Harron said, "where she's being touched by something." It's an ecstasy worth revisiting.
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I understand Harron's intent, but this is still a pretty dull film.
You said: > Not sure how you can make a case for that. The film was inspired by Bettie's life, but is FAR from being about it. The screenplay rewrote her biography and took artistic license to the hilt. That's one of the reasons Bettie Page disliked the film when she viewed it at a private screening at the Playboy Mansion. Examples: The John Willie scene was totally fabricated; there's no evidence that Bettie ever met or posed for John Willie. And don't even get me started on that gang rape scene that never happened as depicted -- or even when it allegedly occurred. One of the greatest disservices done by this film was to "introduce" Bettie to people who were clueless about her life, and those viewers then walked away thinking they were familiar with her history; they had no clue that the film totally manipulated and distorted her life's realities. Hope you'll go see her real story, coming in 2010, when her authorized documentary is released. Meanwhile, check out: http://www.bettiepagemovie.com
[...] Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries is appropriately titled in more ways than one: Groups of the fluttering, flittery creatures make a dramatic appearance in the story, which is adapted from Rachel Klein’s popular young adult novel about a possible vampire stalking unsuspecting adolescents at an all-girls boarding school. And the picture itself is wispy and translucent – it has no weight or body, and in some ways it feels more like a TV pilot than a feature film, barely substantial enough to fill up the big screen. Even so, it offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites. Sixteen-year-old Rebecca (Irish actress Sarah Bolger) has just returned to school for the semester. Her father, a poet, committed suicide not long ago, and Rebecca has been haunted by the event. But she’s ready for the new school year, and she’s looking forward to spending lots of time with her classmates, particularly her bestest best friend, Lucie (Sarah Gadon). Their school, formerly a turn-of-the-century luxury hotel, is the kind of place where the grounds are well-manicured and the bathtubs are long and deep – the girls take steamy, soft-focus baths and then shimmy into their long white cotton nighties before drifting off to sleep. [...]