In praise of fearless actresses

As you can tell from the previous entry, I'm excited to see The Notorious Bettie Page when it opens two weeks from today. (Of late, it seems A and I talk of little else.) I finally saw a trailer for it last weekend before Thank You for Smoking (which itself was pretty good). The trailer as a whole was no great shakes, but I was thrilled to see images from the movie at long last.
As Bettie, a nearly unrecognizable (to me) Gretchen Mol nonetheless bears little physical resemblance to the hypnotic pinup queen. More importantly though, like Bettie, she appears game. I don't think I've seen Ms. Mol in anything, but I am familiar with the basic outline of her late-90's Hollywood narrative, a story in which, to destroy her nascent career, the celebrity-entertainment complex did everything short of awarding her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar (all apologies to Marisa Tomei), including lavishing (damning?) her with the excessive or, at best, premature praise most notably captured in that now-notorious Vanity Fair cover article and photo. (Pursuant to the tired Hollywood clichés, we'll dispense with any distinctions between praise and coverage.) The magazine asked, "Is she Hollywood's next 'it' girl?" History answered with a resounding no. I don't know whether her own unfortunate Hollywood experience gives Ms. Mol special access to any maltreatment and manipulation in Bettie's story; in any event, I can't wait to see this biopic of the "dark Marilyn."
The role required Ms. Mol to perform nude and, from what I can tell, to gain a staggering amount of weight to place her just inside the normal-range minimum. I predict, when the film opens, certain middle-aged (heterosexual) male film critics will breathlessly praise the actress' fearlessness in what to them will seem like the second coming of Maria Bello. Don't get me wrong; I like Ms. Bello, especially her performance in A History of Violence. I find, though, it can be difficult to parse the notices for performances in which an actress removes her clothes because it appears that some reviewers have every interest in keeping the T&A pipeline open (a possibly noble but nonetheless distinct goal from that of assessing a performance's quality, I would think).
Another form of "fearlessness" is suggested by Ms. Mol's Bettie but is often calculated to other, more grandiose ends: a clear and sometimes showy attempt on the part of an otherwise beautiful actress to appear unattractive or merely plain or "raw" by gaining substantial weight (by their standards) or abandoning the usual public demands of hair and makeup. Julianne Moore, Naomi Watts and, yes, Maria Bello have all done this to great success, but the statuesque Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning performance in Monster is the ne plus ultra (or nadir) of this aesthetic slumming. Her serial killer was scary and naked! (Of course, male actors have undergone dramatic physical transformations for a role -- Robert DeNiro's Jake LaMotta and Tom Hanks in Cast Away are obvious examples -- but they are usually not similarly regarded for their striking beauty and red-carpet appearances.) Take heart, then, Gretchen: if you want to be thought of as fearless, you are well on your way as a result of exposing your new curves. Now, if you could just do the same while looking positively frightful, you might follow Charlize's gilded path, bypassing altogether the supporting actor awards and any associated curses.
The Notorious Bettie Page opens in limited release April 14.