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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Those costumes! Those actresses! All those daring and unconventional ideas! Oh, wait -- this beautiful, mindless '50s women's-college flick doesn't have any of those.
Dec 19, 2003 | Mike Newell's "Mona Lisa Smile" is a movie designed to make you think, which is precisely the problem: For a story about bohemian intellectuals circa 1950s New England, it sure is low on intellect. Julia Roberts' Katherine Watson is a free-spirited, sexually liberated, unmarried-by-choice art history professor who leaves her native California for a teaching position at that all-girl bastion of propriety, Wellesley College.
Katherine's students, as well as her fellow faculty members, are shocked to the very hem of their crinolines by her unorthodox ways -- doesn't she know it's not dainty to have a penis in your room after 10 o'clock? Bright as her students are, they're less thirsty for knowledge than they are hungry for an MRS. With a dazzling proto-feminist gleam in her eye, Katherine swoops in to change their thinking -- but not without learning a very important lesson about that most modern virtue, the one any contemporary toddler could explain to you but which was apparently beyond the scope of even the most rad-boho human beings in the 1950s: tolerance.
Tolerance, schmolerance -- what about the penis in the lady's bedroom? That's where "Mona Lisa Smile," which was written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, falls down on the job. The movie thinks it's telling us something new: Modern moviegoers will be shocked to learn that 1950s America was a restrictive time and place for women. (The truly sensitive creatures out there may want to cover their eyes during the terrifying montage of household-appliance and laundry-soap ads that runs behind the movie's closing credits.)
The problem with making a movie that's even gently damning of the restrictive qualities of the '50s is that moviegoers adore the restrictive qualities of the '50s, for good reason. Any anti-'50s rhetoric fed to us is going to be scooped up with a giant ice cream spoon: A stretchy hold-all for the things we modern Americans claim to have finally shed our taste for (safety, conformity, impeccable manners), the '50s are the decade we love to hate, the one that makes us feel most self-congratulatory about our groovy modern selves.
"Mona Lisa Smile"
Directed by Mike Newell
Starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Marcia Gay Harden
And yet we murmur to ourselves with a sigh: "Look at the clothes! The cars! Why can't Sony make a plasma-screen TV in a good-looking wood-grain cabinet like that?" And that's the pull that "Mona Lisa Smile" exerts: It's dishy and alluring in a way that works at cross-purposes with its themes. In fact, it would be a much more enjoyable and honest movie if it had no themes -- only actresses and costumes.
So my advice is to stride into "Mona Lisa Smile" without even trying to grab on to any of its sparse, free-floating brain molecules -- in other words, pretend you're the stereotypical '50s housewife the movie so desperately wants us to believe in, and relax and enjoy it. "Mona Lisa Smile" almost works as a women's ensemble drama along the lines of "The Group" or "Stage Door" (it's probably better than the former and not anywhere near as good as the latter). Even as I fumbled around to get a handle on its bony ideas, I found myself constantly wondering: What's going to happen next? Will Joan (Julia Stiles), the upright, brainy beauty, fulfill her dream of going to Yale Law School, or will she stick with her nice, but not exactly progressive, boyfriend? Will Betty (Kirsten Dunst), the smug one who's always announcing loudly how engaged-to-be-married she is, find happiness with a washer, a dryer and a blob of a husband? Will Connie (played by the dazzling Ginnifer Goodwin), the supposedly "chubby" one, find a boyfriend at all?
You don't even need to see "Mona Lisa Smile" to find out the answers to most of those questions, but the answers aren't the point: The getting-there is. Shot by Anastas Michos, the picture has a crisp, burnished sheen -- it looks like the New England of our dreams (which makes sense, since most of it wasn't shot in New England at all). And the costumes, by Michael Dennison, are fascinating in their detail (particularly the stylized Mexican silver jewelry he gives Roberts, which is exactly the sort of thing a West Coast bohemian of the 1950s would wear -- in our movie dreams, at least).
It's a good thing there's plenty to look at in "Mona Lisa Smile," since, despite the movie's roster of terrific actresses, the performances are disappointingly uneven: Dunst and Stiles are both too mannered and precise, even for the stiff, convention-bound characters they're playing. One wonderful actress, Juliet Stevenson, surfaces for a few scenes at the beginning only to disappear altogether, which is a bummer.
Marcia Gay Harden, as a Miss Lonelyhearts type who teaches deportment (she's also Katherine's landlady, welcoming the newcomer into her uproariously staid house of chintz), has some astonishing moments, but she's underserved by a badly written role. We're invited to laugh at the way, dressed in her starchily pressed circular skirts, she teaches her girls that their husbands' bosses will be scrutinizing them for their skill as hostesses. Then she's given a scene in which she tries to flirt, drunkenly and unsuccessfully, with an attractive bartender, humiliating herself and exposing the wounds beneath her polished exterior -- Harden is too subtle an actress for that kind of starkly cartoonish writing.
