Mona Lisa Smile turns the frozen 1950s frown of pre-feminist America upside down, and our expectations along with it. Disguised as a star vehicle for Julia Roberts’ teeth, the picture asks the question that gives DaVinci’s masterpiece its haunting subtext, applying it instead to the American woman: Is she really happy?That may sound like a lot to pull off, even for a big star like Roberts, but Mona Lisa Smile manages to be far more than the Dead Poets Society knockoff that it initially looks like.
Roberts plays Katherine Watson, who has come east from California to “make a difference” in the lives of her students at establishment Wellesley. On the first day of the academic year, she other teachers file into the great cathedral of learning, wearing mortar boards and gowns, awaiting the arrival of the students.
When they come, the school’s president cries out, “Who knocks at the door of knowledge?” This attention to ritual will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time in church. It tells us we are in a place where learning is sacred, where teachers are abbots in a holy order.
That image quickly is replaced by another one. Director Mike Newell turns Katherine’s first day of class into intellectual combat. Attempting to teach art history to a roomful of women who already have memorized the text and are prepared to ram it back down her throat, she loses control of the class.
“If you’ve nothing else for us, we could go to independent study,” she is informed frostily by Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), who is the female version of an alpha dog.
Dunst is so wonderfully bitchy that it’s kind of disappointing when we find out her mother is an unfeeling martinet. That means we’re not supposed to hate Betty, we’re supposed to pity her, although this could take a while; she’s despicable.
Katherine is surprised to learn that the women of Wellesley can imagine no higher ambition for themselves than to marry well, and it’s pretty obvious that the filmmakers mean for us to be surprised, too. Can it be only 50 years since women like Betty took heads filled with Kant and want, and emptied them into their new washer-dryers?
When Betty returns from her honeymoon and sashays into Katherine’s class, expecting her to look the other way after all the work she has missed, the spinster Watson threatens to flunk her. The two of them finally have it out in a sort of pre-enlightenment crypto-feminist cat fight. “If you fail me, there will be consequences,” Betty hisses.
Katherine’s politics prefigure feminism by more than a decade, making her an irresistible role for someone like Roberts, one of the few women who ever has shattered Hollywood’s glass ceiling. She gives a credible performance but never seems at ease living in the skin of someone in 1953. Her clothes and hair are noticeably too modern for the period, as if being socially progressive somehow made her a fashion clairvoyant.
With Betty constantly scheming against her, Katherine’s natural ally is Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), a brilliant student who is eager to get married and start having babies. When Katherine tells her she could get into Yale Law School, it’s clear that Joan has never even considered it.
Mona Lisa Smile sets Joan up as a sort of test case for female liberation, but one of the best things about this sharply observed movie is that it never allows us to get too comfortable with easy certitudes about what is good for these women, and what is bad. A clever twist upends not only Katherine’s expectations, but ours.
