Overall Rating
 Awesome: 3.33%
Worth A Look: 11.67%
Average: 6.67%
Pretty Bad: 31.67%
Total Crap: 46.67%
3 reviews, 42 user ratings
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| Mona Lisa Smile |
by Greg Muskewitz
"Frowns abound."
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A laidback UCLA graduate (Julia Roberts) manages to get a teaching position at Wellesley in 1953, but finds that she must battle for the respect of the pansophist debutantes.Her forte is art history, and when her students prove they know the text as well as she, the question posed then becomes, who decides what art is good art? (The character gets air points for showing a picture of her mother, which a student criticizes for only being a snapshot. “If I told you Ansel Adams took it, would it change your mind?”) The impression she leaves polarizes her students, leaving them either inspired by her mold-breaking way of thinking, or writing scathing pieces in the school’s paper about her subversive, forward-thinking. Of course, it’s easy enough for the today’s screenwriter to critically write about Eisenhower’s era of conformism, all the while making their protagonist seem ahead of the time and smart for it. But notwithstanding the easy embellishment, the initial discourse on art has enough of a hook, and for the moment, Roberts is uncharacteristically restrained. As the movie becomes more critical of the role of women in society, and how Wellesley is a prepping ground for marriage, the focus shimmies over to relationships — the instructor with her lover on the other coast, and a prospective interest in the Italian professor, the already married student, just back from honeymoon, the other student, awaiting proposal but with an application in to Yale law. It contents itself to the banal boredom of a soap opera, flimsy and weightless, and ultimately, with no point to prove but the obvious. (All of the characters are read, from a distance, like a giant billboard.) Mike Newell no longer sees the need to comment on the times and examine the women whom the high society will be made up of, but to drag things along with their romantic notions and/or pitfalls. (High society, they might eventually be, but when the young married couple invites their prospective couple/friends over, they undeniably look as though they’re playing house.) Ergo, the small amount of air it was collecting up in the movie’s favor, is quickly punctured and dispensed of. As a side note, although it could be argued whether Mona Lisa is even smiling, Roberts’ large-lipped smile doesn’t bear any sort of resemblance to the painting. With Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, Ginnifer Goodwin, Juliet Stevenson, Marcia Gay Harden, Jordan Bridges, and Topher Grace.[See it if you must.]
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8405&reviewer=172
originally posted: 05/14/04 09:39:53
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USA
19-Dec-2003 (PG-13)
DVD: 09-Mar-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
19-Feb-2004
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