The Notorious Bettie Page

So... what was the tone of this movie? Honest to goodness, I'm asking anyone who can give an answer. The Notorious Bettie Page is a movie about the first pin-up queen who would frequently appear in bondage pictures... yet I was kind of bored. It just didn't register for me and I can't quite put my finger on why. I thought Gretchen Mol did a rather good job as Bettie Page, the rather prim pin-up queen who never seemed naked when she was nude. I suppose that there simply wasn't a feeling of danger (though the movie moves quickly from her time in Tennessee where she was abused by her father, hit by a husband, and gang raped). They often cut to the black and white of senate hearings on pornography that denounced it as damaging our youth, but honestly, these pictures seem darn near tame by today's standards. (Seriously... imagine ANY of these people reading Stephen Elliott's book My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. They'd pass out.) The "bondage" films were a guy's version of a slumber party. Girls in underwear and heels, playing around, giggling through their restraints and refraining from much actual contact. By today's standards, this simply isn't scandalous and the film made no attempt to really create the feeling that this was, in fact, shocking. So were we to believe that the filmmakers endorse this kind of nudie-cutie porn? Not really. Page was a devout Christian and while she never apologized for her work, she didn't unbutton that blouse once making the decision to devote her life to Jesus. If anything, you were left with the end note of Page saying that Adam and Eve were naked in the garden, but then they put on clothes. It just didn't seem enough for me to have them simply present facts in as unscandalous a way as possible. Not everyone can be Bettie Page whose innocence was maintained despite the pictures - not even the movie about her.
In trying to find words to express why this movie just didn't seem to register for me, I went searching for other reviews to provide so you can have more articulate people talk about it. Here are some clips from a few:

The Boston Globe:

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone, and it suggests that what we call ''Bettie Page" was always just a blank screen on which a severely repressed society could project whatever unseemly fantasies it wanted.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun:

My friend Russ Meyer described her once as "the nicest girl you'd ever want to meet." Now she is the subject of a curiously moving biopic, "The Notorious Bettie Page," which is not very sexy or scandalous, nor is Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol) very notorious. "Celebrated" might have been a better word.
You might expect such a film would aim for scandal. Not at all. Nor is it an attack on censorship or prudery; it doesn't defend Bettie and the pornographers she worked with, but presents them as mundane laborers in the world of sex, finding a market and supplying it. Most of Bettie's bondage photos were taken by Irving Klaw, an unremarkable New Yorker who worked with his sister Paula. "Boots and shoes, shoes and boots," Paula muses to Bettie. "They can't get enough of them. Why? I guess it takes all kinds to make a world."
...
The tone of the movie is subdued and reflective. It does not defend pornography, but regards it (in its 1950s incarnation) with subdued nostalgia for a more innocent time.

The New York Times:

Ms. Mol takes to this tricky role with the carefree expressivity you tend to see only in young children who have learned the joys of nudity, usually when their parents are throwing a dinner party. When she strips, Bettie soars.
That's to the good of the film because while the pinup was mildly notorious, the fully dressed woman wasn't all that interesting.