Mona Lisa Smile
(2003)
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Mike Newell's MONA LISA SMILE is a pretty period film that combines a quaint pedagogical tale with a feminist dissection of traditional female roles in 1950s society. Julia Roberts leads an impressive cast of top young actresses including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, and Julia Stiles. Roberts is Katherine Watson, a revolutionary art history teacher at Wellesley College in 1953. Though she has true admiration for her intelligent all-female students, she is perturbed that their interest in finding husbands takes precedence over their studies. Determined to instruct them in feminist values and teach them to be independent--defying the college's emphasis on breeding good wives, mothers, and homemakers--Watson is deemed subversive by the administration. Even Watson's identity--from California, over 30 years old, and unmarried--is problematic. And when she turns her class onto modern art rather than teaching the recommended classical curriculum, Watson is severely chastised by the staunchly conservative students and faculty. |
1950s feminism gets a soft-focus sheen in this sentimental drama from Four Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell. Ostensibly a female Dead Poets Society, starring Julia Roberts in the unconventional teacher role, it's an emotionally manipulative chick flick with a quasi-intellectual veneer. Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and a vampy Maggie Gyllenhaal are among the students at a New England girls' college in 1953 whose lives are changed irrevocably by the arrival of unmarried art history lecturer Roberts and her scandalous free-spirited ways. Though the characters are all recognisable stereotypes, they're solidly performed, while Roberts makes a sympathetic lead, despite her often anachronistic behaviour and appearance. Newell ably captures the tensions caused when tradition and progression clash, but his simplistic view of the past is governed too much by the present to give the film any real authenticity. The end result is an earnest and glossy melodrama that presses all the right buttons yet never quite convinces.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Slick, predictable drama with Roberts miscast as the earnest pedagogue.