mona lisa smile movie review

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I find it hard to believe that Wellesley College was as reactionary in the autumn of 1953 as "Mona Lisa Smile" says it is -- but then I wasn't there. Neither were the screenwriters, who reportedly based their screenplay on Hillary Clinton's experience at Wellesley in the early 1960s. The film shows a school which teaches, above all, that a woman's duty is to stand by her man, and if Clinton learned that, she also learned a good deal more. No doubt she had a teacher as inspiring as Katherine Watson ( Julia Roberts ), who trades in the bohemian freedom of Berkeley for a crack at Wellesley's future corporate wives.

This is the kind of school which actually offers classes in deportment, grooming and table setting, and the teacher of those classes, Nancy Abbey ( Marcia Gay Harden ) takes them so seriously that we begin to understand the system that produced Cathy Whitaker, Julianne Moore's showpiece wife in last year's "Far From Heaven." Watson finds her students scornful of her California background (every students makes it a point to be able to identify every slide of every painting in her first lecture), but she counterattacks with a blast of modern art, and there is a scene where she takes them to watch the uncrating of a new work by Jackson Pollock.

Of course the board of trustees is suspicious of Katherine Watson, modern art and everything else that is potentially "subversive," and resistance among the undergraduates is led by Betty ( Kirsten Dunst ), whose mother is a trustee, whose plans include marrying an upward-bound but morally shifty Harvard man, and whose editorials in the school paper suggest Watson is leading her girls in the direction of communism and, worse, promiscuity. (A school nurse who gives advice on contraception has to leave her job.)

We are pretty sure what the story parabola of "Mona Lisa Smile" will be (the inspiring teacher will overcome adversity to enlighten and guide), but the movie is more observant and thoughtful than we expect. It doesn't just grind out the formula, but seems more like the record of an actual school year than about the needs of the plot. In the delicate dance of audience identification, we get to be both the teacher and her students -- to imagine ourselves as a free spirit in a closed system, and as a student whose life is forever changed by her.

But, you're wondering, how can I identify with a 30ish teacher and her 20ish female students? Don't you find yourself identifying with just about anybody on the screen, if the movie is really working? Katherine Watson is smart and brave and stands by her beliefs, and so of course she reminds us of ourselves.

Julia Roberts is above all an actress with a winning way; we like her, feel protective toward her, want her to prevail. In "Mona Lisa Smile," she is the conduit for the plot, which flows through her character. The major supporting roles are played by luminaries of the first post-Julia generation, including not only Dunst, but Julia Stiles as Joan Brandwyn, a girl smart enough to be accepted by Yale Law but perhaps not smart enough to choose it over marriage; Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle Levy, who is sexually advanced and has even, it is said, slept with the studly young Italian professor, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Constance Baker, who is too concerned about her looks.

"A few years from now," the Wellesley students are solemnly informed, "your sole responsibility will be taking care of your husband and children." This is not a priority Watson can agree with. She tells the competent but conservative school president ( Marian Seldes ), "I thought I was headed to a place that would turn out tomorrow's leaders -- not their wives." Unlike the typical heroes of movies about inspiring teachers, however, she doesn't think the answer lies in exuberance, freedom and letting it all hang out, but in actually studying and doing the work, and she despairs when competent students throw away their futures (as she sees it) for marriage to men who have already started to cheat before their wedding days.

Watson herself has a fairly lively love life, with a boyfriend in California ( John Slattery ) and now a warmth for the abovementioned studly Italian teacher ( Dominic West ), although it is probably not true, as a student rumor has it, that she had to come east because of a torrid affair with William Holden . The movie is not really about her romances at all, but about her function as a teacher and her determination to install feminism on the campus before that noun was widely in use. The movie, directed by Mike Newell , may be a little too aware of its sexual politics and might have been more absorbing if Katherine and her students were fighting their way together out of the chains of gender slavery. But the characters involve us, we sympathize with their dreams and despair of their matrimonial tunnel vision, and at the end we are relieved that we listened to Miss Watson and became the wonderful people who we are today.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Rated PG-13 for sexual content and thematic issues

117 minutes

Julia Stiles as Joan Brandwyn

Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson

Kirsten Dunst as Betty Warren

Ginnifer Goodwin as Constance Baker

Juliet Stevenson as Amanda

Marcia Gay Harden as Nancy Abbey

Dominic West as Bill Dunbar

John Slattery as Paul Moore

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle Levy

Directed by

• Mike Newell
• Lawrence Konner
• Mark Rosenthal

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Mona Lisa Smile Review – An Inspiring And Beautiful Story

Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, and Julia Stiles starred in this underrated 2003 period drama.

Mona Lisa Smile Review, Summary, and Cast: 

Mona Lisa Smile  is a positive, thoughtful film about the importance of education and a woman’s right to choose her own future.

It’s an intelligent historical drama set at Wellesley College in the early 1950s that tells a familiar story about young women in a new and inspiring way.

MONA LISA SMILE  SUMMARY

Official Description : 

Academy Award®-winner Julia Roberts (Best Actress in a Leading Role, Erin Brockovich, 2000) leads an all-star cast featuring Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Marcia Gay Harden. MONA LISA SMILE is a funny, inspiring and uplifting film about an art history professor with a lot to teach about life and much to learn about romance.

Katherine Watson accepts a post teaching Art History at the very conservative Wellesley Women’s College.

Appalled to find that even her most gifted pupil, Joan Brandwyn (Stiles), believes she is only biding time until marriage, the free spirit Miss Watson sets out to challenge tradition and open up a new way of thinking for her students.

Her teaching methods introduce modern ideas into the heart of every girl in this underrated period drama.

THE CAST OF  MONA LISA SMILE

The  Mona Lisa Smile  cast is its main strength. Julia Roberts as the main character, Katherine Ann Watson, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle Levy, Julia Stiles as Brandwyn, Kirsten Dunst as Betty Warren, Dominic West as Bill Dunbar, Juliet Stevenson as Amanda Armstrong, John Slattery as Paul Moore, Marcia Gay Harden as Nancy Abbey, Topher Grace as Tommy Donegal, Marian Seldes as President Jocelyn Carr, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Connie Baker.

Related Content: 100+ Best Period Dramas on HBO Max to Watch

All share the screen along with many other familiar faces. Everyone is superb, with special commendation to Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julia Roberts, and Kirsten Dunst, who all give compelling performances as the  Mona Lisa Smile  characters.

Marcia Gay Harden is excellent as well portraying a tragic yet ridiculous example of where relying on societal expectations can land you.

MONA LISA SMILE  ANALYSIS & REVIEW

The film itself is visually pleasing and is shot beautifully with great attention to detail. The costumes, sets, and props are well chosen, really putting you in the period. Portions of the film were even filmed at the real Wellesley. 

Mona Lisa Smile  can also be quite moving at times with some powerful moments. For example, when Julia Roberts’ character, Katherine, gives a brutal, honest speech about how future generations will see them.

Related Content:  Netflix’s Cable Girls (2017): Love, Revenge & Betrayal Put Friendships on the Line

Another example includes a particularly well-handled, emotional scene that takes place between Betty (Kirsten Dunst) and Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal), ending in a surprising and poignant way.

The ending sequence is also quite emotional. Overall, you will likely leave this film with a big smile and perhaps even a few tears.

Romance fans will appreciate that romance plays a significant role in this 1950s-set drama. There are several romances in the  Mona Lisa Smile  movie. Katherine herself has two, though given the nature of the character; they take a backseat to her vocation.

A sweet love story also develops between the good-natured Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin) and the equally adorable Tommy.

All in all, I love that  Mona Lisa Smile  is an intelligent film that does not talk down to its audience. The movie talks about feminism (although not much in the way of radical feminism) and the importance of women’s choices, even if that choice is to conform to rather than subvert societal expectations.

The film also asserts the value of women’s education and her right to use that education after graduation.

OVERALL THOUGHTS

In conclusion,  Mona Lisa Smile  is a powerful and intelligent film with a good message about gender roles (particularly the role of women) and social issues with a happy ending.

You will probably like this film if you enjoyed  Dead Poets Society  with Robin Williams. I recommend it.

Director:  Mike Newell

Screenwriters:  Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner

Content Note:   Mona Lisa Smile  is rated PG-13 for very mild sensuality. Nothing explicit. The rating is actually rather harsh.

Where To Watch (as of the update in August 2023):  MAX and Hoopla. You can also rent/buy it on Digital and DVD. 

Featured image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing

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Elinor is a writer and semi-recent graduate of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. She has been writing ever since she could hold a pen but her love affair with fiction started when the entirety of David Eddings’ 'The Belgariad' was read to her at age four. She currently has a couple of books and half a dozen short stories on the go. She spends her free time writing, analysing media and knitting very colourful scarves.

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Mona lisa smile, common sense media reviewers.

Glossy entertainment value but far from art.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Tense confrontations.

Explicit sexual references for a PG-13 movie, incl

Characters use strong language including an ugly a

Characters drink, some get tipsy or abuse alcohol,

Parents need to know that this movie has very explicit sexual references for a PG-13 movie, including promiscuous characters, adultery, and discussion of birth control (which was illegal in the era portrayed in the movie). Characters drink, some get tipsy, and some abuse alcohol. Just about everyone smokes. Characters…

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Explicit sexual references for a PG-13 movie, including promiscuous characters, adultery, and discussion of birth control (which was illegal in the era portrayed in the movie).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Characters use strong language including an ugly anti-Semitic epithet.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink, some get tipsy or abuse alcohol, many characters smoke.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie has very explicit sexual references for a PG-13 movie, including promiscuous characters, adultery, and discussion of birth control (which was illegal in the era portrayed in the movie). Characters drink, some get tipsy, and some abuse alcohol. Just about everyone smokes. Characters use strong language including an ugly anti-Semitic epithet. Strengths of the movie include its efforts to address the issues that would be raised by the feminists of the 1960s and its positive portrayal of a gay character who is accepted without prejudice (though dismissed from her position for other reasons). To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (6)

Based on 4 parent reviews

Nice entertainment

Such a wonderful film, what's the story.

Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) is an art history teacher who comes to Wellesley, "the most conservative college in the nation" in the very conservative 1950s. At first, Katherine is intimidated by the students. They have an easy mastery of the reading material and a "claws underneath their white gloves" ruthlessness in preserving the status quo, which means their status at the top of the social heap. Betty (Kirsten Dunst) is the most ruthless and acts as the leader of the girls. Katherine's other students include brainy Joan (Julia Stiles), plain and insecure Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin), and reckless Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal). In between their lessons on poise and how to entertain their future husbands' bosses, Katherine tries to teach them to question the conventional assumptions about art and about their dreams about the lives they want to lead. Confronted about her teaching methods, Katherine must examine her own dreams in order to teach her students the lesson she wants them to learn.

Is It Any Good?

MONA LISA SMILE adds up to glossy entertainment that is a long way from art. In the movie, a vibrant and independent-minded teacher shows her students a paint-by-numbers kit for a Van Gogh picture to show them the difference between art that is insightful and meaningful and mindless repetition of pretty images. The problem is that the movie has a paint-by-numbers script and little more to offer than pretty images.

All of the actresses look wonderful in their elegant little hats, white gloves, twin-sets, tulle, and pearls. And teacher-student is one of the most reliably appealing relationships to portray in a movie. But there is no real insight or spirit in the movie and its dumbed-down portrayal of the post-WWII, pre-Betty Friedan era is particularly disappointing, limited to images of conformity like girls rowing crew and practicing synchronized swimming and a poster explaining the ladylike way to cross one's legs and references to the wish to return to the "normal" days before the war. Katherine's character is inconsistent to the point of being erratic, especially with regard to her own romantic involvement. Roberts is reduced to relying on movie star tricks like her "game girl" laugh and moist gaze to fill the gaps.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why each of the characters makes the choices that she does.

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 19, 2003
• On DVD or streaming : March 9, 2004
• Cast : Julia Roberts , Julia Stiles , Kirsten Dunst
• Director : Mike Newell
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Columbia Tristar
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 110 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sexual content and thematic issues
• Last updated : November 23, 2022

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Dead Poets Society

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Mona Lisa Smile

I n the early 1940s, there was a concerted effort by the American government to persuade women to throw themselves into the war effort by filling the jobs left vacant by their husbands in the armed services. Five years later, the propaganda shifted and the government set out to persuade them to abandon their brief, newfound freedom. Rosie the Riveter had to become Rosie the Housewife.

Assisted by the advertising industry, Hollywood, TV, the church, property developers and the education system, Washington campaigned to make American women feel guilty if they didn't accept their subservient roles as dedicated wives, caring mothers, proud homemakers. It made economic and social sense in the booming consumer economy that followed the war and a period of suffocating conformity ensued.

It became known as both the Eisenhower era and the McCarthy era, and Mike Newell's movie, Mona Lisa Smile, begins in 1953 during Dwight Eisenhower's first year in the White House, when Joe McCarthy was at the height of his powers. It was also the year Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was first translated.

The movie takes place over a single year at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, one of the exclusive universities for women on the East Coast known as the Seven Sisters, and Newell may well have thought of Mona Lisa Smile as 'Two Semesters, One Disastrous Marriage, a Few Little Funerals and Some Small Moral Victories'.

The two semesters are the academic year 1953-54 during which the liberated, progressive 31-year-old Katherine Wilson (Julia Roberts) comes from the lower-middle-class world of Oakland, California to teach art history at this snobbish, hidebound institution. Her aim is 'to make a difference' at a place she thinks of as a finishing school for upper-class girls posing as a university.

The film's marriage is between one of her most contemptuous pupils, Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), and a rising young banker, scion of an important family, and in keeping with Katherine and the film's views on conformity and early matrimony, it goes rapidly wrong. The little funerals are of the careers of victims of the system - a lesbian school nurse of progressive views (Juliet Stevenson) who provides contraceptive advice and diaphragms to students is fired; a frustrated teacher of speech, poise, deportment and homemaking (Marcia Gay Harden) takes to drink in her chintzy rooms, and so on.

The small triumphs centre on Katherine's teaching. After a stumbling beginning when she's mocked by her smart, condescending pupils, she begins to challenge them in a Socratic fashion, forcing them to ask questions about art that direct them towards interrogating the condition of their own lives.

Probably Newell and his scriptwriters, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, had in mind two other famous college movies that are about education rather than football and proms and which also have a strong sense of the crucial period they're set in - the 1966 film of Mary McCarthy's The Group and the more recent Dead Poets Society. The Group begins in Vassar, also one of the Seven Sisters, and is about highly privileged girls, the daughters of the suffragette generation, graduating in 1933, the year Roosevelt came to power, and determined to change the world. Most of them see their high hopes dashed.

Dead Poets Society, set a few years after Mona Lisa Smile in the final days of the Eisenhower era, has an anarchic teacher at a smart New England prep school shake up his class through his imaginative approach to English literature.

Newell's vision of the world is less cruel than McCarthy's, and, in an odd sense, less sentimental. And quite rightly Julia Roberts doesn't attempt to compete with the bravura of Robin Williams's Dead Poets Society schoolmaster and comes across as intelligent, dedicated and a decent teacher. More than either of the other films, it shows that whatever we do, our characters and lives are shaped for better and worse by the pressures and ethos of the times we grow up in. The mood and décor of the period are convincing, though there are odd slips (a teacher of deportment for middle-class girls using 'cool' as a term of praise; the belief that Rhodes Scholarships are available to women in 1954). And perhaps there is too much use of golden oldies (in snappy new arrangements) to establish that this is all taking place before the rock revolution that was soon to arrive.

The movie is not, however, especially subtle and the new teacher arriving to transform the difficult or complacent class was approaching cliché status when Glenn Ford played him in The Blackboard Jungle 50 years ago. The darker shades of the charismatic teacher we find in Frenzy (the 1944 film Ingmar Bergman wrote for Alf Sjöberg) and The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie are not to be encountered here. There is also a subplot involving a male teacher acting in bad faith that doesn't quite ring true. Still, this is an intelligent, attractive and good-looking film.

The revealing montage of newsreel material on the polite subjugation of women after the Second World War that appears at the end of the film might have been better placed at the beginning.

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Mona Lisa Smile Reviews

The cartoon notions of the '50s and snooty Easterners say more about Hollywood cluelessness than about the period the film condescends to...lacking the courage of its own vulgarity, Mona Lisa Smile is as tepid as old bathwater.

Full Review | Mar 12, 2018

Just what we need: a pyjama party posing as a movie.

Full Review | Dec 20, 2017

Glossy entertainment value but far from art.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 26, 2010

Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal furnish well-observed performances that frequently outshine Julia Roberts's reflex characterization in this female variant of "Dead Poets Society."

Full Review | Original Score: B- | May 12, 2009

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 2, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2005

Period dress, set design, manners and acting are fine--as is Mike Newell's direction. If only the script was less predictable.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Oct 30, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Oct 7, 2004

...would have been better served by characters with a little less formula than the paint-by-numbers projects so loved by these women of Wellesley College.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 20, 2004

Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.

Full Review | Original Score: 60/100 | Jul 20, 2004

Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.

Full Review | May 14, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 17, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 16, 2004

Smiles turn to frowns when you sense a paint-by-numbers feminist formula taking control.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2004

Devoid of enjoyment, intelligence or interest.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 27, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Jan 27, 2004

É um pouco difícil levá-lo a sério, já que sua postura de 'filme-denúncia' soa, no mínimo, anacrônica.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 24, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 16, 2004

Mona Lisa Smile Review

12 Mar 2004

119 minutes

Mona Lisa Smile

There are some roles Julia Roberts was born to play - a tart with a heart, say, or a likeable and famous actor - but a charismatic, inspiring 1950s teacher is not one of them.

She glides into Mona Lisa Smile like a walking anachronism - nice, but always a movie star. We have to be told several times that she's bohemian, for we certainly wouldn't have known otherwise. It's this kind of clumsy characterisation that reduces a film that could have lived up to its 'female Dead Poets Society' tag to an acceptably diverting piece of fluff.

On arriving at the girls' school, Katherine (Roberts) befriends a lesbian teacher (Juliet Stevenson) who is swiftly dispensed with when the message behind her role has been conveyed to the audience. She then locks horns with a conservative student, Betty (The Bitch), who exists solely to challenge Katherine's beliefs, and plays mentor to Joan (The Brain), who exists solely to become a sponge for them.

Two performances stand out, thanks in part to characters that hint at two dimensions rather than one. Marcia Gay Harden works the tragicomic potential of Nancy, a vulnerable spinster teacher who clings to the school's traditions in an attempt to bury her sorrow.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is delightful as Giselle, in theory The Slut but in practice the most engaging character this film has to offer. Her key storyline - an affair with the vacantly handsome Italian teacher (Dominic West) - exposes a young woman struggling with the emotional demands of the sexual freedom she's outwardly keen to embrace. This subplot is the only one to add weight to the film's generally sketchy feminist message. The other girls' romantic interludes are often entertaining, but have a negligible relationship to the central themes and certainly do nothing to deepen our understanding of them.

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; Creeping 1953 Feminism, Without Quite Dispelling Dreams of Prince Charming

By Stephen Holden

• Dec. 19, 2003

''You can bake your cake and eat it too!'' says the reassuring slogan that distills the comfy revisionist feminism informing ''Mona Lisa Smile.'' That slogan is repeated empathically enough to qualify as the defining mantra of a movie that pretends to be audacious. And the lurking duplicity in that loaded word ''bake'' (remember Hillary Rodham Clinton's sarcastic remarks about baking cookies?) winds up applying to the movie itself. Like ''Down With Love'' earlier this year, ''Mona Lisa Smile'' preaches disruptive female self-empowerment out of one side of its mouth while out of the other it invokes the dream of being swept up, up and away by Prince Charming.

A miscast but irresistible Julia Roberts stars as Katherine Watson, a free-spirited Californian who moves East to teach at demure, snooty Wellesley College in 1953 and shakes up the place enough to be deemed subversive by the institution's hawk-eyed thought police. The insistence with which Katherine presses her mildly progressive agenda at the elite women's college makes her a kind of academic Erin Brockovich, or so the movie wants us to believe. And in her art history classes, which inspire the screenplay's most intelligent writing, she challenges her students to do more than simply identify paintings shown in slides.

Why is an original van Gogh a work of art and a reproduction not? she asks. And where does a do-it-yourself, paint-by-numbers van Gogh fit into the scheme of things? The early 50's also brought the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism, and the appearance of a Jackson Pollock canvas on campus stirs up ripples of controversy.

But Katherine's biggest boo-boo has nothing to do with notions of aesthetics. Arriving at Wellesley, she is appalled to discover that almost to a person, her brilliant, privileged students have no postgraduate ambitions beyond settling down with Mr. Right, having babies and baking sugar cakes for hubby. Her rebellion culminates with an indignant, heretical slide show of vintage magazine ads displaying perky, smiling Stepford wives reigning like queens in their immaculate kitchens.

The movie, which opens nationally today, was directed by Mike Newell, whose popular films ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' and ''Enchanted April'' tease you with the same glimmerings of something loftier before settling into a warm and fuzzy niche. Like his fellow Briton Richard Curtis (''Love, Actually,'' ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' ''Notting Hill'' and the screenplay of ''Four Weddings''), Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.

A star-watcher's guilty pleasure, the movie rubs together three of Hollywood's brightest younger stars -- Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal, all playing Wellesley seniors -- and throws in an appealing newcomer, Ginnifer Goodwin. Topping off this marshmallow sundae are vivid turns by Marcia Gay Harden as the world's prissiest (and weepiest) teacher of elocution and poise, Juliet Stevenson as the discreetly lesbian school nurse with progressive ideas about birth control, and that empress of hauteur, Marian Seldes, playing the intransigently starchy college president. Dominic West, as a carnivorous-eyed professor of Italian who sleeps with his students, gives the movie its requisite shot of testosterone.

If Ms. Roberts is the undisputed star of ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' she graciously allows her acolytes plenty of opportunity to sparkle. Each plays a specific type. Ms. Dunst is Betty Warren, a vicious, overprivileged alpha girl and archtraditionalist hellbent on marriage to a louse, who attacks Katherine in the college newspaper.

Ms. Stiles is Joan Brandwyn, Betty's best friend and Katherine's protégée, who finds herself torn between marriage and Yale Law School. Ms. Gyllenhaal, who almost steals the movie, plays Giselle Levy, the wised-up class rebel who sleeps around and almost loses her bearings. Ms. Goodwin's character, Connie Baker, is the house wallflower (and chief victim of Betty's cruelty) who can't believe it when a boy asks her out. Although the four are stock figures, the talented actresses shade their stereotypes enough to lend them as much humanity as the formulaic screenplay (by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal) permits.

As the story follows Katherine through her first year at Wellesley, there are enough reversals to keep you guessing which characters will escape this upscale cuckoo's nest, although it's not very hard to figure out. Although Ms. Roberts is playing a grown-up academic, the aura she wafts is as ingenuous as ever. She is still the wide-eyed but feisty people's princess and angel of common sense whose high-beam smile can melt steel. Think of ''Mona Lisa Smile'' as ''The Best of Everything'' meets ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.'' Or better yet, ''Goodbye, Little Miss Chips.''

''Mona Lisa Smile'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for strong language and mild sexual situations.

MONA LISA SMILE

Directed by Mike Newell; written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal; director of photography, Anastas Michos; edited by Mick Audsley; music by Rachel Portman; production designer, Jane Musky; produced by Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Deborah Schindler and Paul Schiff; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 100 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Julia Roberts (Katherine Watson), Kirsten Dunst (Betty Warren), Julia Stiles (Joan Brandwyn), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Giselle Levy), Dominic West (Bill Dunbar), Juliet Stevenson (Amanda Armstrong), Marcia Gay Harden (Nancy Abbey), Marian Seldes (Jocelyn Carr), Ginnifer Goodwin (Connie Baker), Topher Grace (Tommy Donegal) and John Slattery (Paul Moore).

Mona Lisa Smile

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

“Irritating” doesn’t begin to describe Julia Roberts as Katherine, an art-history prof who arrives at Wellesley in 1953. She’s in her prime and eager to teach Stepford girls to be fem-bots. Did she have access to the see-the-future machine that Ben Affleck invented in Paycheck ? Smirky Katherine seems to know every step in the women’s movement from the last fifty years.

The girls are played by a who’s who of young Hollywood womanhood — Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal — each given one emotion to play and each forced to stare at Roberts in awe for showing them the way. That Mike Newell ( Donnie Brasco , Four Weddings and a Funeral ) directed this insulting swill is beyond depressing. Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.

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'Mona Lisa Smile': Liberating Lessons

The best thing about the new Julia Roberts picture "Mona Lisa Smile" is that it's not really a Julia Roberts picture at all. It's an ensemble piece, on the theme of incipient feminism, set at Wellesley College in 1953.

Sure, Roberts's smile sometimes dazzles like an elven beam out of Rivendell, and she's the prime mover in the private dramas of half a dozen lives. But the movie isn't pitched to her in the way that the season's purest essay in star narcissism, "The Last Samurai," is pitched to Tom Cruise. He's at the center of every scene and there's no sense of life outside his immediate presence. Moreover, in this film, Roberts, as a first-year art teacher, can be wrong, she can be ugly, she can be emotional, and in the end, she can be something close to tragic. She's merely real, never mythic. And that's what's so good about the movie.

Formally, "Mona Lisa Smile" might be seen as the spawn between "The Group," Sidney Lumet's acerbic version of Mary McCarthy's even more acerbic Vassar-set novel, and "To Sir -- " oops, no, "Sands of Iwo Jima." Yeah, the one with Duke Wayne as Sgt. John Stryker, USMC. You thought, of course, I'd conjure up "To Sir, With Love" or "Conrack" or "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," or any of a dozen or so great teacher movies. But it's not really a great teacher movie: It's a platoon movie, one that begins with a group of youngsters under the leadership and influence of a rookie platoon sergeant who makes some mistakes. It stays with them through a campaign in which some of the younger people are broken, some are mended, some learn, some lose, some quit. At the same time, the young leader must endure being broken, mending, learning, losing and quitting. So it has the pleasures of formula to it, not great pleasures, possibly even guilty pleasures, but pleasures nevertheless.

The Wellesley of 1953, it says here (and who knows whether it's said rightly or wrongly), was a kind of smothering institutional incubator for young women about to be hatched into a certain life. Though their IQs were somewhere north of the 130 mark, they were, by tradition, culture, parental wish and totality of social wisdom, fated to marry immediately a fella approved by all those monitors and prepare for a life as a junior exec's wife, a pot roast and Jell-O mechanic (getting those marshmallows to float, that was the genius of the trick!), learning to play bridge, vote Republican, subscribe to Mr. Luce's clever magazine, buy a Frigidaire and age gracefully to the role of gracious assistant to the great and glorious creative vice president of Winston Doyle Greenberg or full partner at Van Dyne, Eckland & Waterbury!

It seemed to occur to nobody that this was a colossal waste of intelligence, talent and wit. The movie takes off from the appearance in this cozy little Eden of someone who did notice. That's Katherine Watson, a young art history teacher from Berkeley, who gets to fulfill her dream when she's hired at the exclusive school she never could have afforded to attend. The film makes the point that she's not really a radical, hellbent on destroying. She's not fueled, not really, by resentment, rage, secret feelings of inadequacy or any of the secret pathologies of the revolutionary class. It's just that she looks out into those faces, and sees so much more for them than they see for themselves.

Anyone who's ever been moved by a teacher to dream a slightly bigger dream than his parents thought he or she was capable of achieving ought to love the film, for it gets at a truer model of teacher's inspiration. No anthems are read, no mandates nailed to doors, no bras burned. All that would come later. Instead, Roberts's Kate simply offers the whiff of possibility, and, of course, she is nearly destroyed for it.

Each of the students is nicely portrayed, and the film does prove once and for all that Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles are different people. I'm not sure which is which, but I believe Dunst, a cute if pouty-faced blonde, plays an engaged girl named Betty, who is thought to be the smartest, but is so invested in the system that she's the most threatened by Watson's attempts to nudge, and so turns really ugly. Stiles, meanwhile, is also very smart, but she's the movie's concession to human nature and the reality principle: Though smart enough for Yale Law, her Joan Brandwyn still wants most of all to be a housewife, and she has the message that opens Watson's eyes: I will be what I want, not what you say I should want. Maggie Gyllenhaal was my favorite, the sexual sophisticate Giselle Levy, not a virgin, not guilty, not repressed, hungry for experience, but wise in stunning ways.

The director, Mike Newell (big hits: "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Enchanted April"), clearly is at home working with female casts and also a disciplined hand. He keeps the scenes brisk and gets to the emotional peak of each one quickly, then departs. He's not one for a lot of mewling and bawling; his technique is far too austere for that. Sometimes he shorthands a bit -- I felt that Marcia Gay Harden, who plays an etiquette teacher, and great old Marian Seldes, as president of the school, are close to stereotypes. And one must wonder: Is this really fair to Wellesley, after all, one of the great colleges of America?

But the movie, with its panorama of emotional epiphanies and its belief in the talent and grace of young women, is nevertheless bracing.

Mona Lisa Smile (117 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for sexual content and emotional intensity.

Julia Roberts plays a 1950s Wellesley teacher who shows her students possibilities beyond the Stepford lives awaiting them.

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• DVD & Streaming

Mona Lisa Smile

Content caution.

In Theaters

• Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson; Kirsten Dunst as Betty Warren; Julia Stiles as Joan Brandwyn; Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle Levy; Ginnifer Goodwin as Constance Baker; Dominic West as Bill Dunbar; Juliet Stevenson as Amanda Armstrong; John Slattery as Paul Moore

Home Release Date

• Mike Newell

Distributor

• Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

The movie is about a 1950s art teacher who wants to change the world one student at a time. Its message? Marriage is one of the least desirable choices a young woman can make.

Katherine Watson is something of a bohemian. But when she gets an opportunity to teach art history at one of the country’s most prestigious institutions for women, Wellesley College, she jumps at the chance. She physically moves to New England, but she brings with her her “California-style” progressive (subversive) values. Once there, she’s surrounded (she feels suffocated) by gaggles of traditionally minded pupils, an outwardly conservative faculty and a stern college president.

Under the glassy surface, though, boils discontent and immorality. One of her housemates (the school’s nurse) is a lesbian who distributes illegal contraception to students. A fellow teacher (with whom Katherine falls in lust) is known for his philandering—with students. Another housemate (the poise, manners and elocution instructor), while an icon of decorum in public, is so brokenhearted over a lost love that she rarely leaves her seat in front of the TV. Outside, everyone’s all smiles. Inside, hearts are aching and breaking all over campus.

Katherine’s remedy for the pain all this duplicity brings? Modern art. The all-out pursuit of personal fulfillment. And the complete rejection of all things traditional. Katherine’s student’s remedy? Booze—and quick engagements.

Positive Elements

Katherine refuses to stay in a relationship that includes deception. Her ideals are misplaced, but her care for her girls is genuine. She teachers her students to think for themselves (positive on the surface, but she then fills their heads with amoral values). Indeed, Mona Lisa Smile includes many “positive” elements that are ultimately sullied by the overarching messages that surround them. For instance, a woman is shown to be devastated when her husband ignores her in favor of long business trips and other women. Another discovers that clear communication between people can many times clear up damaging rumors and misinformation.

Julia Stiles’ character Joan is pretty much the only one who clings to principle and clear-headedly pursues her dream—of marriage. She grapples with the ups and downs of trying to figure out how to interweave “occupation” dreams with “family” dreams, but when push comes to shove, she chooses her future family over her aspirations to become a lawyer. (Undoubtedly, Katherine’s damaging advice messes with her head, and the lingering impact of her words may explain the uncertain look in Joan’s eyes after telling her teacher she would certainly regret neglecting her family more than she might regret setting aside her corporate ambitions.)

Sexual Content

Classic artwork includes nudes. Archive footage from the 1950s shows women wearing bras and bathing suits. In the dormitory, one girl playfully tries to kiss another. It’s “well-known” that Professor Bill Dunbar sleeps around, and that his favorite females are his students. Katherine is said to have had an affair with movie star William Holden, and it’s implied that she has been having a sexual relationship with a beau back in California. Also, she and Bill have sex (implied by images and conversation after the fact). Believing it’s Bill who is taking a shower, Katherine rips open the shower curtain exposing a stranger inside (views of his midsection are obstructed). A student’s husband is seen kissing another woman. The college girls talk and joke about sex, birth control, affairs and male anatomy.

The school nurse (a self-professed lesbian) ends up getting fired for giving girls contraception, but the tone surrounding the events clearly communicates that such a firing is unjust and despicable.

Violent Content

Crude or profane language.

No obscenities (f- and s-words). A dozen or so mild profanities (“h—,” “d–n,” “a–“). God’s name is used as an interjection three or four times and is combined with a profanity once. Jews and Germans are on the receiving end of an ethnic slur each. A crude term is assigned to male sexual anatomy.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The students smoke and drink every chance they get. Wine and hard liquor make frequent appearances with the girls chugging from bottles, glasses and small flasks. Bill and Katherine get drunk in a bar. The school’s “manners” teacher also gets smashed.

Glamour asked Julia Roberts why she chose to be a part of Mona Lisa Smile . Julia responded, “It seemed like a good story to remind girls coming up in the world how far we’ve come—and how much we have to be grateful for. It was a lot of struggle to get us to this point, you know, so that we can vote and wear pants and all the rest.” She’s right. A lot of good social changes have happened over the course of the last century (though I’m not sure I’d put slacks on the list of top achievements). And a lot of misguided ideas and ideals were a fixture in our society during the 1950s. But a cultural commitment to marriage wasn’t one of them. So Smile starts looking like a pretty big frown as it throws out the proper value of nuptial vows along with the improper subjugation some women historically faced.

Feminism in its purest, most biblical sense is torn to shreds here by “feminism” in its most compromised, worldly sense. Katherine says repeatedly that she’s all for “doing both”—getting married and having a career. But she’s unmistakably overjoyed when she learns that one of her married girls is getting divorced (a release that will allow her to go to Yale). And she ferociously demeans the laudable tasks of homemaking—cooking, cleaning, mothering, etc.—leaving moviegoers with the unshakable feeling that any woman with half a head on her shoulders should stay as far away from the home (and all those lying, scheming, cheating men who come with it) as they possibly can. “I didn’t realize that by demanding excellence I would be challenging the roles you were born to fill,” Katherine says scathingly. Somehow, I don’t remember reading those kinds of sentiments in Proverbs 31. The message that you can do more and be more is a superb one. But when it’s implied that the path to such self-actualization is necessarily pockmarked with immorality, Christian women shouldn’t find it too hard to denounce it.

Why is all this so important? Because it greatly affects the world we live in. Plugged In Online reader Ashley Pawloski got a chance to see a sneak preview of Mona Lisa Smile , so I received her letter in time to include it here. She wrote, “Monday night my friend got us two preview movie tickets to see Mona Lisa Smile at the theater. We have been talking about seeing this movie for at least two months. I was beyond excited to see a movie set in the 1950s, with all the neat outfits, the makeup, the hairstyles. I love the era. Within the first 15 minutes of the movie, though, I was subjected to at least three moral dilemmas: sex outside of marriage, sex before marriage and homosexuality. I started to get this sick feeling in my stomach. The school nurse (who is a lesbian) gives “birth control” to the young college-age girls. A student is sleeping with her language teacher. And the main character, Katherine—who doesn’t believe in marriage—is having casual sexual relationships. One student does get married but of course her husband cheats on her within the first three weeks. These are all images that I have fought hard since high school. I am a 23-year-young lady who has been happily married for a year and one month. My husband and I are devoted to the Lord and to each other. I do work, but one of my largest desires is to be a wife and a mother.”

This movie makes it just a little bit harder for Ashley, and everyone else, to do that.

Steven Isaac

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Produced by, released by, mona lisa smile (2003), directed by mike newell.

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Review by Perry Seibert

Wellesley College is a women's college where the best and the brightest women of New England's privileged class come to learn, if not necessarily to think. Mona Lisa Smile is about how the new art history teacher, unmarried Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), asks the young women of that university to reject the oppressive domestic goddess lifestyle that awaits almost all of them after graduation. Of the three students most affected by Watson, Maggie Gyllenhaal's Giselle Levy gets the best lines. The alcohol-swilling, sexually promiscuous rebel she plays feels like a product of the '50s, and Giselle quickly adores finding an older role model in Watson. Julia Stiles does the best work in the film as Joan Brandwyn, who opens up to the possibility that she does not have to marry her sweetheart. Her scene with Roberts after she makes the decision about her future is the best scene in the film because it is the only one in which anybody shows Watson that her beliefs may not be best for everyone. Sadly, the talented Kirsten Dunst as rich bitch Betty Warren is saddled with the worst scenes and the worst dialogue in the film. She suffers simply because she accepts wholeheartedly what she has been spoon-fed from childhood. Her punishment is so total and so extreme that the film becomes little more than a wholehearted acceptance of Watson's world view. That, plus the cartoonish treatment of Marcia Gay Harden as a heartbroken spinster who intensely believes in the importance of properly planned dinner parties, makes Mona Lisa Smile feel like a feminist film made by Wellesley graduates who want you to learn about feminism, but do not ask you to think about it.

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Sunday 14 June 2015

Movie review: mona lisa smile (2003).

3 comments:

The female dead poets society

...and that's maybe why Mona Lisa Smile does not get as much respect as it deserves.

it's just as good as that film, and still it gets overlooked. it's unfair.

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Mona Lisa Smile Parent Guide

In the fall of 1953, a frigid and traditional New England school for young women gets a jolt of warm Californian mind-set. Hired as the new art history teacher, Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) begins to challenge her female students (Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ginnifer Goodwin) --not in art, but in the traditional roles of womanhood they have learned since childhood.

Release date December 18, 2003

Run Time: 125 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kerry bennett.

In the fall of 1953, a frigid and traditional New England school for young women gets a jolt of warm Californian mind-set. Hired as the new art history teacher, Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) is anything but conformist. Wearing thick, bulky sweaters and pants, even her appearance stands out among the proper “skirt and blouse” faculty.

Arriving at her first day of classes, she is overwhelmed by the thoroughness with which her students have prepared. Well-versed with all the paintings, the upper crust students quickly put Katherine in her place. However, it doesn’t take long for the teacher to realize that while these girls know their works of art, they are better at regurgitating information than thinking for themselves. Taking training in the finer points of matrimony and homemaking as well as physics and English, most of the young women in her class are only biding their time until they can snag a good marriage proposal.

Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), a scathing student editor for the campus paper is already in the throughs of final wedding plans. She isn’t about to let a single woman call into question her decision to marry. Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles) offhandedly comments about law school but is in fact nearly engaged as well. That detail doesn’t stop Katherine from encouraging the gifted scholar to apply to Yale.

However, for Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who spends more time keeping men happy than studying, Katherine is a kind of example of progressive thinking—- a woman outside the staid conventions of Wellesley College. Even timid Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin) is inspired by her teacher to assert herself among the other girls.

Unfortunately while Katherine’s character is meant to inspire these undergraduates in an age when the feminist movement is gaining momentum, her actions may not motivate parents to turn their daughters over to her care. Willing to hop into bed with a known womanizer and unable to commit to a relationship, she and most of the other women in the film portray poor role models if not extremes on the feminine pendulum. A homosexual teacher (Juliet Stevenson) causes a scandal on campus when she begins handing out contraceptives. A heartbroken marriage and homemaking instructor (Marcia Gay Harden) wiles away her evenings in front of the TV after she is deserted by her boyfriend. Even the accomplished, female head administrator proves to be so stymied in cultural mores that she is unable to embrace progress..

Combine that failing with the frequent use of profanities and cigarettes, and this little slice of upper society life may leave us believing that the 50’s were merely an era when women pasted on a smile…an elusive, ambiguous kind of Mona Lisa Smile.

About author

Kerry Bennett

Mona lisa smile parents' guide.

This movie and others like it ( Far From Heaven , The Hours ) depict the 1950’s as a time when many women were unhappy. Do you think that was reflective of all women? Over the last 50 years, choices for women have expanded. Have these increased opportunities made the women of today any happier?

How did Katherine’s dress reflect her attitude toward the more formal mores of the college?

The most recent home video release of Mona Lisa Smile movie is February 2, 2010. Here are some details…

Release Date: 2 February 2010

Mona Lisa Smile releases on Blu-ray disc with the following extras:

- Featurettes: College Then and Now and What Women Wanted: 1953

- Music Video: The Heart of Every Girl by Elton John

Related home video titles:

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