Reviewers wary of Julia Roberts as the reactionary’s dream girl have made arguments that “Mona Lisa Smile” is actually an anti-feminist Trojan horse. The film’s generally congratulatory tone, telling the audience how much better we are now then we were then, seems to be saying that the fight is “now pretty much over.” (It’s more likely that “Mona Lisa” is looking at how far we’ve come, and it’s not saying that we’re finished. But bear with me.) “Mona Lisa’s” stuffed shirts are so stuffy and so bluntly villainous that a girl might leave the theater believing that, as long as she doesn’t behave as badly as a “1950s” housewife does, she could become the next Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Outdoing Marcia Gay Harden’s horn-rimmed spinster puts the bar pretty low, like saying that we’re not being racist as long as we don’t take part in lynching.
Lastly, if the girls are not dynamic characters, that means that only Roberts’s professor is. And what lesson does she learn? She learns to temper her fervor, not increase it. If the movie is a Trojan horse, then “Mona Lisa Smile” is actually more subtle than it seems. Or it’s even more of a colossal train wreck, setting out to do one thing but inadvertently resulting in doing the opposite. I suspect this is the case.
Finished September 27, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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