Mona Lisa Smile

I actively disliked Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) so it is a little anomalous that I enjoyed Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile which is effectively its opposite gender equivalent. Both films are well-made mainstream productions so I suspect the explanation comes down to the fact I’m happy to watch anything with Julia Roberts in it and have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to a Robin Williams film (with the appropriate exception of Mrs Doubtfire, 1993). 

Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a recent UCLA graduate who gets a job as an art history teacher at the prestigious (and real, Hillary Clinton graduated from it) all-female Wellesley College, in 1953. Determined to ‘make a difference’, as we are literally told, from her first lecture the idealistic Katherine finds herself confronted with a class full of snooty, entitled young women from very well-to-do homes who are perfectly content with their lot and an institutional culture which has no interest in endorsing her “subversive” views.

Even in the 1950s the notion of teaching art history at an archly conservative East Coast college hardly strikes one as a particularly bold world-changing strategy. And sure enough with the film opening with a Wellesley-bound Katherine musing over a slide of one of the iconic images of modern art, Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, it looks like Mona Lisa Smile is going to be a soft-core exercise in feminist history, dutifully conjoining the changing status of the modern woman to the familiar narrative of the boundary-breaking progress of modernist painting. And this is exactly what the film is.

In that respect Mona Lisa Smile is pretty awful, smugly full of the benefits of hindsight, and it was critically-savaged in its day, particularly by female reviewers, for its patronizing simplicitudes. But for all its clichés and its middle-brow gushing over art with a capital A, Newell’s film is entertaining enough. Well that is unless you’re antagonistic to Roberts whose famous and you’d think inappropriate wide screen smile (it has nothing of La Gioconda’s smirk) gets a lot of exposure.

What makes it work, however, are the dynamics between Roberts and fine cast of young actresses, rigged out in twin sets and strings of pearls, who play her antagonists – Kirsten Dunst as Betty, the avowed defender of the Victorian ideal of woman as homemaker and handmaiden, Julia Stiles as Joan her more intelligent bestie, Ginnifer Goodwin as Connie their plain Jane friend and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle, a self-destructive party girl who represents the obverse side of the womanly ideal – the whore.

In support roles Marcia Gay Harden, Marian Seldes and Donna Mitchell add colour as respectively, a neurotic etiquette teacher, the stern Collge President and Betty’s archly WASPish mother,  Juliet Stevenson goes to waste as a briefly seen lesbian nurse whilst the men, Dominic West and John Slattery et al, are very much on the sidelines.

Let’s face it. Although as an actress she is maturiing, a Julia Roberts movie is a Julia Robert’s movie. You're paying for the smile.  If you are going to watch her play an academic, even in the humanities, and expect intellectual rigour and self-aware wit you’ve got rocks in your head.  Mona Lisa Smile has a lot of fun with Eisenhower-era America. Take it like that and you should have a good time.

FYI:  From the point of view of historical accuracy Wellesley was much more advanced than it is here portrayed,  It developed the first modern art course anywhere in the country in 1926, when art department head Alice Van Vechten Brown hired Alfred H. Barr Jr. as an assistant professor of art history. Barr went on to become the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art where Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon now dwells.

For those interested, one of the best examples of this kind of things is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).
 

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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