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  Film: Mona Lisa Smile February 22, 2004 Reporter : Peter Thompson Peter's verdict: not so easily dismissed Director: Mike Newell Genre: drama Video: broadband  Most of the time, film reviewers are pretty much in step with the paying public … but not always. Mona Lisa Smile scored poorly with critics in America but has gone on to perform well at the box office. Compared with Lost in Translation, for example, which has been universally praised but has taken just $40 million in the US over 22 weeks, Mona Lisa Smile has earned $63 million in a third of that time, without the benefit of a single Oscar nomination. But you have to wonder when critics are driven to describe a film as "insulting swill", "as tepid as old bathwater" and "offensive idiocy". What's going on here?Julia Roberts steps into the decidedly unglamorous shoes of Katherine Watson as she arrives at Wellesley College in the autumn of 1953. Like most of her peers, she regards Wellesley as the pre-eminent women's college in America, appealing to the best and brightest girls in the nation. But it's also an institution welded to tradition… Mona Lisa Smile has been variously compared to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Dead Poet's Society and Far From Heaven, amongst others. That's one of the things critics do, usually with malicious intent, and comparisons can be highly misleading. But it is true that Katherine is passionate and idealistic and her first class on the history of Western art is traumatic. She quickly loses control. Katherine's high hopes of inspiring and informing a new generation come up hard against the pressure on her students to conform to a rigid social agenda. A good marriage means far more here than a good degree and the unmarried Katherine's efforts to promote a more liberated agenda meet stiff resistance, especially from the brilliant Joan Brandwyn, played by Julia Stiles.  It's not uncommon for women to marry while at college and the wedding of Betty Warren is a glittering affair. Not 10 years earlier, American women had been doing the work of the men who were away fighting a war. Now they're reverting to the values of their grandmothers. And when Betty, that's Kirsten Dunst, returns to class, she's ready for a fight.Powerful as they are, Joan and Betty don't turn everyone against Katherine. Her most enthusiastic supporters are Giselle Levy (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) — and Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin). The themes of the film are further developed through the characters of Nancy Abbey, played by the remarkable Marcia Gay Harden, and briefly by Juliet Stevenson who plays the school nurse Amanda Armstrong, dismissed for providing contraceptives to the students. Balancing all these characters and stories takes some doing. When critics want to put a director down, they connect him to work that reflects badly on him. So many referred to Mike Newell solely as the director of Four Weddings and a Funeral which could imply that he's a lightweight talent. In fact, he's proved to be impressively versatile with credits such as Donnie Brasco, Pushing Tin, Dance with a Stranger and the rarely seen Bad Blood to his credit. The most common error in pressing the case against any creative work is to attack it for being something it isn't. Many critics denounced Mona Lisa Smile for telling a predictable story of moral and intellectual enlightenment. In fact, it's much more ambivalent than that although it's hard to show how without giving much of the plot away. Others accuse the film of overkill…  Perhaps if Mona Lisa Smile was nothing more than another put-down of '50s conformity it could be more easily dismissed. More than one critic has said that we love the '50s because they make us feel superior, but I looked hard for evidence of that within the film and didn't find it. Certainly, the attitudes explored range from comic to lethal but the underlying theme concerns the nature of conformity itself and who's to say we're less conformist now than we were back then? As the title Mona Lisa Smile suggests, you can't necessarily judge by appearances. |
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