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Mona Lisa Smile (2003)
July 11th, 2009 by hildachoysblog
Friday, December 19, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
MOVIE CON: "Mona Lisa Smile"
By the Book: Methodical 'Mona Lisa Smile' touches all the bases in oft-told story
By CAROL CLING
REVIEW-JOURNAL
New art instructor Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), erect, challenges her staid Wellesley students in "Mona Lisa Smile."
Katherine (Roberts) introduces ladylike Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), center, and her classmates to the shock of the new: an symbolic expressionist painting.
Irony rears its persistent little head yet again.
"Mona Lisa Smile" claims — and aims — to celebrate individuality, rule-flouting and nonconformity.
Yet it winds up conforming to every safe, stale regulation in the Hollywood rule book.
Those who have seen multiple variations on the trusty "Teacher Who Changed My Life" theme, from "Dead Poets Society" to "The Emperor's Club," will recognize much of "Mona Lisa Smile."
Especially, inevitably, in the person of the teacher herself. In the movie, she's called Katherine Watson. But in the movies, we know her as Julia Roberts. And we know all her tricks, from her plucky (sometimes strident) attitude to her soda-pop giggle and her wide, watermelon smile.
In "Mona Lisa Smile," Roberts deploys this personal artillery with practiced ease, generously sharing the screen, and contrasting styles, with the four young stars who play her students. (I'd call them up-and-comers, except three of them — Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Stiles — already have arrived.)
As a result, "Mona Lisa Smile" also recalls another hoary movie genre in addition to the familiar "Life Lessons on Campus" category.
That would be the vintage "Make Your Way in the World" soap opera, in which three or four young women — chorus girls, shop girls, career girls — take on the big bad world and discover their diverse destinies. Along the way, there's always an older, wiser — and, usually, sadder — woman who's been through life's meat-grinder and can warn them of the trouble that comes from trying to Have It All.
Like many of these movies, "Mona Lisa Smile" takes place in the buttoned-down '50s. But it's a sign of these post-feminist times that the older woman has metamorphosed from a jaded harpy to a winsome heroine in need of at least as much guidance as the students she seeks to challenge.
Not that anyone expects Katherine to shake things up so much when she arrives at Wellesley College, that bastion of genteel tradition for young ladies of high intelligence — and, just as importantly, high-born breeding.
After all, despite her Berkeley bohemian pedigree, Wellesley is the one place Katherine always has wanted to teach.
And is it her fault that her precocious, show-offy students already know all the material she's planning to cover in her introductory art history class?
Clearly, creative thinking is in order. And creative thinking isn't something encouraged by the Wellesley powers-that-be.
As Katherine learns her lessons by bucking the stuffy status quo, four of her students also have angst-filled seas to sail.
To make it easier to tell them apart, each has a single distinctive character trait she can wear like those cute little beanies the Wellesley girls sport on campus.
There's bitchy Betty (Dunst), a smug, upper-crust snob offended by Katherine's lack of respect for Wellesley traditions. Joan (Stiles), the smart, ladylike one, downplays her post-graduate law school ambitions, opting instead for the Mrs. degree she plans to collect after graduation. Bad girl Giselle (Gyllenhaal) delights in scandalizing her schoolmates with her freewheeling sex life, which includes such shockingly unsuitable partners as a dashing young professor (rascally Dominic West, alias "Chicago's" Fred Casely). And Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin, late of TV's "Ed"), a shy, lovelorn wallflower, seems totally unprepared to handle the slings and arrows of outrageous romance. Especially with Betty, always happy to show off her sadistic streak, making the dating arrangements.
That might sound like a lot of plot, but "Mona Lisa Smile" turns out to be more interested in using its characters as symbols than developing them as people. Which in turn may explain why the screenplay — by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal — seems so schematic and rote.
It's almost as if the movie has a checklist to cover — and you can sense the screenwriters ticking off each required element. Confrontation scene between the snippy, snooty student and the firebrand feminist teacher? Check! Comeuppance scene where snippy, snooty student gets a taste of her own bitter bile? Check! Heartwarming reconciliation scene where both acknowledge they've learned from each other? Check!
With versatile veteran Mike Newell ("Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Donnie Brasco") calling the directorial shots, "Mona Lisa Smile" moves at a brisk clip and smoothly juggles its multiple subplots.
But Newell works so hard creating a suitably stultifying atmosphere that he reinforces the movie's paint-by-numbers feel. "Mona Lisa Smile" conforms to stereotypes about conformity so doggedly that it seems more like a live-action glass snow globe than a movie, quaintly evoking a vanished time and place rather than bringing it to life.
Within such an artificial environment, Newell's cast members struggle to break free.
Some succeed, especially the saucy Gyllenhaal and the calculating Dunst. Some, alas, wind up trapped in the movie's swamp of sugary glop, despite their most valiant efforts. The latter fate awaits, among others, "Mystic River's" Marcia Gay Harden (an Oscar-winner, not so long ago, for "Pollock"), who's all dimpled, dainty desperation as the jilted spinster teaching Wellesley's all-important etiquette and deportment classes.
As for our gal Roberts, her spunky spirit and sunny smile cover a lot of ground — a good thing, too, considering her character's almost total lack of insight. For a woman who's supposed to be a "subversive" influence in a staid academic environment, she certainly seems anxious not to rock the boat in all but the most superficial ways.
But that seems particularly fitting, considering "Mona Lisa Smile's" anxious efforts to play it safe.
CAROL CLING
MORE COLUMNS
film:
"Mona Lisa Smile"
running time:
119 minutes
rating:
PG-13; voluptuous situations, mellow themes
verdict:
C
now playing:
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