Mona Lisa Smile Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)December 18th, 2003
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If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and acts like a duck, then it must be Mona Lisa Smile, the new film you just knew was a Dead Poets Society rip-off the instant you saw its trailer. Initially, I had every intention of avoiding the Dead Poets comparison, hoping to come up with something a little more clever, but Smile is such a brazen robbery, it's completely impossible not to do it.
Instead of rich boys, Smile is populated by rich girls. Instead of being taught poetry from a male teacher, they learn art history from a woman. Instead of standing on their desks and shouting, "O Captain, my Captain," these students show they're all fully behind their unconventional educator by showering her office with Van Gogh paint-by-numbers projects (the irony, since Smile is a paint-by-numbers film, seemed lost to most of the audience, who all applauded at the end). The ending induces even more cringes - it's just too painful to recount here.
Smile takes place at Wellesley College during the 1953/54 school year. Co-producer Julia Roberts (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) plays Katherine Watson, the school's new art history teacher who hails from California. This, together with Katherine's marital status (She's single! And she's in her 30s!) leads teachers and students alike to label the newcomer with adjectives like "progressive" and "subversive" and probably a bunch of other words that end in "ive." Therein lies Problem #1.
Problem #2 comes via the tried-and-true new teacher versus a classroom full of kids who couldn't care less if said teacher immediately dropped dead. They're the typical grouping of young women: Alpha Bitch Betty (Kirsten Dunst, Levity), Giselle the Slut (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Casa de los Babys), Brainiac Joan (Julia Stiles, A Guy Thing) and Ugly Duckling Constance (Ginnifer Goodwin, TV's Ed). Katherine is horrified to learn that each student has already plowed through the course's textbooks and can easily identify every major piece of art created over the last two millennia. Then she decides to ask them their opinions, which freaks the kids out because of the lack of a clear-cut right or wrong answer. They have no opinions, or ambitions beyond landing a husband. The sheep metaphor is driven home by scenes of students participating in synchronized swimming...like we didn't already get it.
Katherine begins to stir things up even more upon the realization that Wellesley is nothing more than an expensive finishing school, but by then Smile is just going through the motions (including the requisite romance with an Italian professor played by Chicago's Dominic West). Marcia Gay Harden (Mystic River) steals scenes as Katherine's old biddy landlord-slash-roommate (Hint: She's what Katherine is afraid of becoming, or worse yet, what others might perceive her to be), though one has to wonder if she is now contractually obligated to appear in every picture that even mentions Jackson Pollock.
Smile does show the tiniest testicles by dealing with lesbianism at Wellesley (a gay nurse, played by Bend it Like Beckham's Juliet Stevenson, is fired in the first five minutes for providing students with contraception), though it totally drops the ball when it comes to Ugly Duckling Constance. It's so obvious that this character was intended to be a suicide victim, but either test audiences hated it or the studio thought suicide would be too dark for a commercial Christmas film. Constance is left as a glaring loose end.
The idea of a movie about a teacher catching hell from her administrators for veering off the approved syllabus that isn't the slightest bit subversive itself (the film follows the same "syllabus" that every other teaching film has used since The Blackboard Jungle) is laughable in more ways than I can possibly comprehend. That's what you get from the screenwriting team of Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, who were responsible for the monkey double feature Planet of the Apes and Mighty Joe Young, as well as '80s gems like The Legend of Billie Jean and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Another misstep for the inconsistent Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral vs. Pushing Tin and An Awfully Big Adventure), who will be working with much better material when he takes over the Harry Potter franchise with the Goblet of Fire.
1:59 - PG-13 for sexual content and thematic issues
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