“You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” – Julie Roberts’ Mona Lisa Smile” (2003)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, 2003   

I usually don’t like to start a film review by going off on a somewhat unrelated tangent but since I am now a well-established former film editor I will take that privilege here. Although the film under review, Julia Roberts’ Mona Lisa Smile, has little to do with Leonardo De Vinci’s famed portrait now uncomfortably housed in the Louvre in Paris it does have much to do as will be explained below about art history and so I may not be as tangentially off the mark as one might expect. To get to the point I have held the view that the reticent Ms. Lisa is not smiling at all but is rather perhaps the first pictorial sign in the modern age of ironic detachment. Fire away but that is what has always impressed me about milady (and maybe reflecting too an unsuspecting bit of wit and charade of the part of the famed Type A personality Leonardo).      

Now back to business. Back to the art history part that forms the backdrop for the storyline here. Katharine Watson, Julia Roberts’ role, is a West Coast come East free spirit as an art instructor at Seven Sisters Wellesley College ready to do battle with old-fashioned views of women and of the traditional art syllabus. The time, the 1950s, seems to be out of another world to an early 2000s viewer brought up on the 1960s idea of the Seven Sisters schools and their Ivy League cohorts as elite bastions of privilege which kept the old elites stocked but also allowed the increasing number of arrivistes to gain the brass ring. Instead the 1950s version of Wellesley is far from the Hillary Clinton (Class of ’69) model of young women ready, willing and able to be President of the United States or to break any other glass ceilings out there.              

Art instructor Watson finds plenty of smart girls at the school, book smart as my old friend Pete Markin would say, as to be expected but they are wasting their talents preparing to be the perfect housemate (meaning well-mannered stay at home wives not significant others) for those up the road Ivy League guys who will form the next core of the men in the grey flannel suits come graduation. She also finds a clear class bias among those students taking her course in art history since while the place may or may not have been an upscale “finishing school” in the 1950s they knew she was not a brethren. Did not have the pedigree. The main concern then reflected in a good housekeeping course provided by the school was marriage, suitable upscale marriage, but marriage nevertheless which seems to be all they wanted to discuss including why Miss (now Ms.) Watson was not at the advanced age of 30 married herself.    

The battle is on as Ms. Watson tries might and main to get these fact heavy but by the numbers thinking young products of good schools and good families to think outside the box, to appreciate for example post-Impressionist art. As the school year grinds on she make some headway after butting heads with the most conservative girl, Betty, played by Kirsten Dunst, in the little coterie who are featured in the film who if you can believe this actually got married during the school year unsuccessfully as it turned out since she was filing for divorce before the school year was out. (Having gone to college in the 1960s I was astonished that anybody, any undergraduate, would get married during the school year. I do not remember any such person in any of my classes and have asked around and found the same thing. Now of course that is a common sight on college campuses.)

The fight between Ms. Watson and Betty got resolved in Ms. Watson’s favor at least formally. When the question of renewing her contract came up the administration was ready to heave her unless she agreed to several non-negotiable demands which she rejected out of hand and headed to Europe after having made serious inroads with those uppity students. Ms. Watson almost as an afterthought by the scriptwriters had an affair with a philandering male fellow teacher but that is just so much fluff since this is drop dead Julia Roberts after all and not some closet old maid. The heart of the story line here though is a slice of elite women’s college life in the red scare Cold War 1950s when thinking outside the box was more perilous than you might have thought. Maybe even thinking Mona Lisa was not smiling might have been suspect.