MOVIE REVIEW
'Mona Lisa Smile' is few strokes short of masterpiece
By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service
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(PG-13) Two Stars (Fair) |
Julia Roberts stars as a 1950s Wellesley art teacher who shows the dumbed-down art device to her students to illustrate the era's shallow values and especially the compartmentalization of women. But it's also a sadly appropriate symbol for this uninspired movie that stays predictably within the lines.
"Mona Lisa Smile" explores the concept of a rebel teacher who inspires students, but riles the heck out of school administrators and other proponents of the status quo. As such, it offers minor echoes of far better films like "Dead Poets Society" and "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie."
The film's only originality is its focus on early '50s attitudes toward the place of women, especially in the upper echelons of society.
When eager newcomer Katherine Watson (Roberts) arrives to teach art history at the imperious Seven Sisters college for the '53-'54 school year, she's bowled over with the intelligence and preparedness of her students. But she's discouraged that they seem hungrier for husbands than for true learning.
Despite the school's academic reputation, the most important class seems to be etiquette, where the young women learn the proper ways to set a table, to host a dinner party for the husband's boss, and other niceties of domestic bliss. It's taught by a sad sack of a teacher (Marcia Gay Harden) who pines for the man that got away decades earlier. She's the living embodiment of what'll happen to the young women if they don't learn the finer points of domesticity.
Watson is dismayed that two of her brightest students seem willing to toss aside their potential. Betty (Kirsten Dunst) is an arrogant high-society girl who considers wedding planning a fair excuse for skipping class and Joan (Julia Stiles) seems willing to cast aside admission to Yale Law School to accept a marriage proposal.
Their friends also define themselves by men — the pudgy wallflower Connie (Ginnifer Goodwyn) by the men she can't get and the promiscuous Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal) by the one-night stands that parade through her life.
Each girl's subplot plays out like a mini soap opera, using little subtlety or grace to hammer home the era's narrow-minded attitudes toward women. The suds soon wash away each of the film's moments of moving drama — especially from the remarkable and underused Gyllenhaal.
Even the usually charismatic Roberts fails to have much impact. She does what she can with the material, but is ultimately done in by the surprising lack of imagination or emotional depth in Newell's film. For the man who previously made "Donnie Brasco," "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and the enchanting "Enchanted April," "Mona Lisa Smile" is markedly pedestrian.
Rated PG-13, with profanity, innuendo
