Mona Lisa Smile

Review by: Alysa Salzberg
(AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com)

The Mona Lisa’s famous smile is faint, enigmatic, even indecipherable. The same can be said of this movie.

It’s 1953, and Professor Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) has decided to leave “liberal” California to teach art history at New England’s Wellesley College. She’ll have a hard time of it – not only are the icy winters brutal, but her students, while incredibly intelligent, are a group of young women largely brainwashed by 1950’s conservatism. In other words, grades and classes are important, but nothing is more important than a ring on your finger and the ability to one day have your husband’s supper on the table promptly at 5. Among these suppressed students, we have Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), a newly-married collegiate whose strong ideas on everything from art to contraception, clash sharply with Watson’s own; Joan Brandwyn (Julia Styles), a promising scholar who harbors a secret hope to forego marriage and go on to law school (though, as Watson insists when things get rough – and they often do – it is possible for a woman to have both a career and a family); Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a brash, jaded undergrad who seems one of the few not under Wellesley’s pro-family values spell; and Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin), a spunky girl who harbors secret insecurities that may ruin her chances at happiness. Professor Watson will find herself responding as most of us in the audience would – by trying to change the way these girls see the world, and themselves.

Yet somehow, things don’t go as smoothly as planned. This is true, not only of what happens in the film, but of the film itself. It seems that with all the conflicts his different characters have to face, director Mike Newell was frantically trying to pack everything in to the movie’s 117 minute-running time. So we find ourselves frequently rushing from scene to scene like a chicken with its head cut off. Transitions that might have worked nicely, given an allowance for subtlety and a few more seconds, are all too often poorly hacked together. As a reviewer, I’ve praised a number of movies for good editing. Mona Lisa Smile draws quite the opposite response from me.

This kind of filmmaking also takes its toll on the treatment of time. For example, in one scene, Watson is descending a small stone staircase when she slips on the ice covering the step at the top. What could have been a laugh- or gasp-inducing moment is mostly just disorienting; we see Watson start to slip, then, without anything else, she’s supine on the ground. Where did the actual fall go? Maggie Gyllenhaal’s presence in the film doesn’t seem to be the only link between Mona Lisa Smile and the time-bending Donnie Darko.

Even longer events seem clipped and cut. The film takes place over the course of a school year, and yet Newell seems to ...