** (out of ****)
Starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Marcia Gay Harden, Donna Mitchell, and Dominic West
Directed by Mike Newell & written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal
2003
117 min PG13
Beware of modern movies set in the 1950s. They’re all about “Repression!” and “Conformity!” “Mona Lisa Smile” draws lines between the “free spirits” and the “stuffed shirts” early on and, with little variation, the free spirits are always right and the stuffed shirts are always wrong. An emblematic scene involves the free spirited art teacher taking her class to look at a Jackson Pollock. The girls are disgusted but we, in our modern smartness, know better. “Mona Lisa Smile” congratulates us when it should be challenging us. The result is obvious and tedious, with overwrought music beating us over the head in case everything hasn’t been hammered home hard enough.
I am reminded of Lasse Hallestrom’s heavy-handed “Chocolat,” in which what ought to have been a genuine conflict of ideologies is replaced with a beating. Set in a Northeastern girls’ college in the 1950s, which is essentially a glorified and disguised finishing school, a factory for producing high-heeled vacuum-cleaning housewives, “Mona Lisa Smile” does not for an instant treat the traditional values challenged by its heroine with the slightest respect or even understanding. From the first, everything valued by the girls and taught to them is framed and seen as laughable. I happen to agree—most of that stuff is stupid—but the result is not an interesting film. If the girls are supposed to be dynamic characters, then showing all their initial values as ridiculous and not even bothering to understand them denies us an opportunity to deeply share their journey from one set of values to another. If the movie’s argument is to work—and frequent readers of my site know I never slight a film for having an agendum—more often than not the opposition should at least get in a couple of words edgewise. In “Mona Lisa Smile,” we’re never really “there,” we’re only “here,” looking down on them, looking “back then” as opposed to “nowadays.”
The free spirits are led by the new art teacher (Julia Roberts), who challenges them with Pollock and being unmarried. The opposition is led by a newlywed student (Kirsten Dunst) and her mother (Donna Mitchell); typical of the film’s utter lack of subtly, mother and daughter are the Darth Vaders of the wife-as-her-husband’s-assistant school. Mother is all yin and no yang, which—unless we’re talking about the Nazi-esque villain of a pulp shoot-‘em-up—is the surest route to a boring character. In keeping with “Mona Lisa’s” motif of obviousness, Roberts is described as “subversive” three times and “progressive” twice. Roberts’s other students respond to her with varying degrees of wariness and enthusiasm. She is also beset by the philandering Italian professor (Dominic West of “Chicago”) and is made housemate of a walking caricature of Old Maid (Marcia Gay Harden, Oscar winner for “Pollock”). That the Italian professor would eye Roberts is not surprising. That she would respond so encouragingly in the second half of the film is bewildering.
“Mona Lisa Smile” has a few neat scenes. An interlude in which Roberts shows how women are depicted in advertising is inherently interesting. Dunst is earnest in her role as the Princess Bitch and Topher Grace of “That ‘70s Show” brings an easy, boyish charm to his independence-crushing potential husband. Another student, played by Julia Stiles, embodies the idea that a housefrau is only a wasted life if it is forced on a woman, and not if it is chosen. The scene in which Stiles reveals this is an hour-and-twenty-minutes into the film, far too late to rescue the film’s uninteresting black-and-white morality. By the 1950s, American men had long succumbed to the notion that “a man is his job.” Worship of The Career was then and still is an unspoken religion. Part of Roberts’ crusade is to convert women; another interesting scene, also too late in the film, finds her confronting the idea that she may be forcing The Career on the girls the way their mothers are forcing The Home on them. (To see just how unfulfilling Fulfillment Outside the Home can be for men, watch any Michael Mann film.) Sadly, I’ve already said more about these paradoxes than the movie does.
But consider the greater depth given to the lot of a housewife in “Far From Heaven.” Julianne Moore has a wide array of responsibilities and therefore sees her life as rewarding. Imagine how much more interesting and dramatic “Mona Lisa Smile” would be if this view of the 1950s housewife were pitted against Roberts’ professor. Consider how social mores and norms are maintained in Nicole Holofcener’s “Lovely and Amazing,” in which the sisters and mother played by Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer, and Brenda Blethyn keep each other in check by thoughtlessly tossing off short, unintentional, and unconscious criticisms. Compare this to the blunt obviousness of Dunst’s mother in “Mona Lisa Smile” and the constant use of words like “subversive” and “progressive.”
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