Review: 'Mona Lisa' painted with cliches
Despite Roberts, film nothing more than pretty picture
By Christy Lemire
Associated Press
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Julia Roberts plays a bohemian art professor in "Mona Lisa Smile."
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(AP) -- Blindly following society's edicts and becoming a housewife is bad. Thinking for yourself and following your own path is good.
You don't need a degree from Wellesley to figure that out. But apparently the makers of "Mona Lisa Smile" think they need to educate you by beating you over the head with feel-good feminist platitudes.
The lesson might have been helpful -- or even relevant -- if the film, set in 1953, hadn't come out 50 years later. But that was then and this is now, rendering "Mona Lisa Smile" archaic.
As is, director Mike Newell's film plays like "Dead Poets Sorority," with Julia Roberts in the Robin Williams role as a forward-thinking Wellesley College professor urging her students to free their minds.
Aside from amassing an arsenal of talented young actresses (including Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal), dressing them in sweater sets and pearls and finding just the right shade of red lipstick to match their skin tones, the film seems pointless.
Stiles, by the way, pulls off the Eisenhower-era look flawlessly with her blonde bobbed hair and prim carriage. Roberts seems an anachronism, though, for the same reason Tom Cruise does in "The Last Samurai" -- this person's larger-than-life persona as a contemporary Hollywood star overshadows her ability to immerse herself believably in a period piece.
In "Mona Lisa Smile," she plays art history professor Katherine Watson, who's come to Wellesley from UC Berkeley to teach art history. Her methods are considered unorthodox by the all-women's college's conservative standards -- she teaches about Picasso and Pollock! -- and the words "progressive" and "subversive" are used so often to describe her, it could be a drinking game.
Not that the hubbub matters; most of her students, including society girl Betty (Dunst) and overachiever Joan (Stiles), are more interested in walking down the aisle in a wedding dress than ever wearing a cap and gown. For that education, etiquette teacher Nancy Abbey (Marcia Gay Harden) is far more useful.
Kirsten Dunst is part of an excellent cast, but the movie is little more than an empty period piece, says AP reviewer Christy Lemire.
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But Katherine provokes some others, including bad-girl Giselle (Gyllenhaal) and shy Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin). She also provokes the attention of Bill Dunbar (Dominic West), the hottie Italian professor who has a reputation of sleeping with his students, even though she has a boyfriend (John Slattery) back home.
Eventually, the administration feels threatened and demands to see and approve her lesson plans. And despite her efforts to inspire these bright young things, Katherine ultimately must resign herself to her initial impression: Wellesley is "a finishing school disguised as a college."
The actresses manage to overcome the material somewhat -- namely Dunst, playing against her good-girl type as a manipulative blue blood; the sexy, scene-stealing Gyllenhaal; and Harden, who brings her usual grace to her role as a withering spinster.
And cinematographer Anastas Michos ("Man on the Moon") films them and the lush Wellesley campus with the appropriate autumnal glow.
But since everything else about the script from Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal ("The Beverly Hillbillies") is so pat and facile, there's no way the ending could be anything short of inspirational.
Class dismissed.
"Mona Lisa Smile," a Columbia Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for sexual content and thematic issues.
Copyright 2003 The
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