Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile (2003) has a handsome licked finish that comes as much from stylish women and their boyfriends as from attention to contextual details – television quiz shows, advertisements replete with the social mores of the day, and references to the American context approximately 12 years after Pearl Harbour. We are in the time of Eisenhower and Mc Carthy, when a woman’s place is at home to guarantee better homes and gardens and when sauce for the goose is not the same as sauce for the gander.
Newell sets his story in the “Elitist Icebox” of Snobsville – the all-womens Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA, where, along with academic subjects, the “smartest women” of the country learn speech, elocution and poise. They are made aware of a simple fact, “…the only grade that matters is the one your husband gives you.”
Katherine Watson (“Doctor Watson, I presume?” a student taunts), reputed for intelligence over lineage, had hoped she would be at “a place that would turn out tomorrow’s leaders – not their wives”. Like most good teachers, Katherine (Julia Roberts) believes she has something to offer and like most romantics, she wants to – and feels she can – make a difference.
In her first class, History of Art, 100, Katherine’s over-privileged cavalier students upstage her with pellets of syllabus knowledge. They accurately identify pictures projected on slides and rattle off names, dates, and locations before superciliously striding out of the classroom. Instead of having a meltdown, Katherine proposes to challenge them with some basic questions – what is good or bad about art and who decides?
Over the course of the academic year, the girls study Pieter Bruegel and Vincent van Gogh, but also the work of Jackson Pollock. Katharine’s method is exploratory and the girls find themselves opining on artistic works instead of merely regurgitating facts. They learn that grades do not come from merely referencing the work of experts, and also, for the first time in their boy-obsessed, date-designing and husband-hunting lives, they learn that kitchens need not be a chief or only source of amour-propre.
All this comes at a price. The college considers Katherine almost as “subversive” as Amanda Armstrong, (Juliet Stevenson) the school nurse (mentioned in whispers to have had a “companion”), is dismissed for encouraging promiscuity. Amanda’s offence? She had equipped the girls with contraceptives. Katherine is not dismissed but pulled up for her “unorthodox” teaching methods, her non-professional relationship with Italian professor (and fake war hero) Bill Dunbar (Dominic West) and because she extends counsel beyond her academic compass. She must, in other words, conform to the Wellesley way if she is to stay on for a second year.
Scriptwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal allow four student friends to take the fore – each a stereotype played by young stars of promising talent. Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) is the vindictive alpha daughter of a Wellesley Board member. Betty has a chip on her shoulder and as editor of the college paper vilifies anything that challenges Wellesley’s established mores. For a good part of the film, she is her mother’s daughter – “apple:tree”. But when Betty’s marriage to a Harvard two-timer crashes, she realises it is not enough to make the coffee, but time to smell it. Constance Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin), the wallflower cellist used to playing second fiddle, finally wins her day, and Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhall) who has the cleverest lines in the film, chooses Bohemia for all time. It is Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), however, who keeps the central message of the film in place by showing her teacher that a woman’s personal choices do not need to be validated by anyone else – not even the teacher who taught her students to make such choices. In choosing marriage and home over law school, Joan exemplifies Katherine’s own maxim to look “beyond the image”.
Katherine Watson could well have been one of the first zealous readers of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (which was first translated in the year the film is set) but the script endeavours to keep us on Katherine’s side – not at all an arduous task. Although her affairs past and present do not make much difference to the story, in her role as a dedicated teacher, Julia Roberts infuses her character with the fire and ice and passion and integrity that make a teacher impactful.
Low on hysterics and sentimentality, Mona Lisa Smile is a quietly persuasive story about influence, choices, consequences and identity.