MONA LISA SMILE is what can diplomatically be called a safe film. Its full of lush cinematography that evokes a cloying sense of nostalgia for the early 1950s where the action takes place. There are the adorable outfits the almost all-girl cast wears. The soundtrack is full of pop standards calculated to set the mood and move a few albums. The script is about as challenging, surprising, and intriguing as a bowl of lukewarm cream of wheat. Unsalted.
Its all designed as a showcase for our star, Julia Roberts, who looks lovely and emotes mightily as Katherine Watson, a non-conformist college art professor at Wellesley. We know shes a non-conformist and, gasp, a bohemian because, one, shes from California, two, she wears funky and fun ethnic jewelry, and three, she doesnt have a perm like all the other gals way back when. Teaching at Wellesley has always been her dream job until she gets there and finds out that the institution is stuffy and the students wonderfully brilliant, but elitist. Her first day in the classroom, one of her well-groomed students hurls the name of the non-Ivy League school where Katherine took her degree as an epithet of the worst kind and it stings.
The script sets up some lovely and very easy paper tigers with which Katherine can spend the film doing battle. Its the repressive, conformist 50s and Katherine wants to think for herself. She wants to teach about Jackson Pollock, the school would prefer Michelangelo. Her roommate/landlord (Marcia Gay Hardin) is a repressed spinster pining for the man that got away while teaching college-level courses in what to do when the boss is coming to dinner and bringing extra guests. Im not kidding. No wonder that Katherines classroom full of bright-eyed gals with high I.Q.s dream of marrying themselves into the American dream of living through their families. Katherine will have none of it, and apparently shes the only one who can open their eyes to other possibilities, going so far as to drop an application to Yale Law School onto the desk of a pre-law student who is on the fast track to suburbia instead of a legal career. Naturally, everyone resists this breath of fresh air espousing views that no one in the 21st century audience would consider disagreeing with. But, also naturally, the students eventually come around to worship this extraordinary woman who sometimes actually dares to be seen in public without lipstick. Perhaps because the first of them to marry finds, predictably, that conjugal bliss isnt all its cracked up to be. The story also calls for Katharine to go from unsteady novice to self-assured professional and thats just what she does without missing a beat in the carefully calibrated script. And, of course, she still finds time to start the requisite romance with a hunky fellow professor (Dominic West) who also dallies with the students on the side. I didnt actually test this out, but I believe you could actually set your watch by when the plot points unfold.
The students are the usual mix. Theres the judgmental one (Kristen Dunst) with a controlling mother, the smart one whod rather procreate than become a lawyer (Julia Stiles), and the one whos discovered sex. That last would be Giselle, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal with all the subtlety of a lynx in heat. Dunst is only slightly less of a caricature, sporting an evil squint and a look that might actually be able kill and so brimming with venom that you wonder why the others dont run screaming from the room whenever she shows up even before she starts spewing the latest round of insults from her razor-sharp and tart tongue. Stiles is better, all but unrecognizable with Grace Kellys demeanor and an affected diction upper-crust diction that sounds like bad imitation of Katherine Hepburn.
MONA LISA SMILEs funniest moment, albeit unintentional, has our intrepid Miss Watson holding up a paint-by-numbers kit of Van Goghs Sunflowers to her students as she decries it as an example of all that is wrong with the way society sees art. Its hard to credit, but our scriptwriters seem to have been completely oblivious to the fact that the script they churned out is itself a product of write-by-numbers. full of stock characters and clichéd situations. I love the irony, but nothing else in this dreary example of hack filmmaking.
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