Mona Lisa Smile
In ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' a progressive art-history professor tries to teach the snooty know-it-alls dotting her lecture hall that life is bigger than marriage. The year is 1953, the school Wellesley College, the professor no less than Julia Roberts. The question is why.
If we're transported to the Massachusetts of a half-century ago for a message that no longer needs mongering, here's Roberts's Katherine Watson to the rescue all the same. She arrives from UC Berkeley thoroughly modern and every inch the movie star. In her eyes and the movie's, the Wellesley of yesteryear has a student body whose unofficial major appears to be housewifery.
Watson's students are a gang of colorful (though scarcely colored) types. In a fine introductory scene with her students, the faces start popping out of the crowd as Watson whips through slides of artwork. There's Julia Stiles, as Joan the overachiever; Maggie Gyllenhaal, as Giselle the sexpot; Kirsten Dunst, as Betty the marriage-bound shrew; and introducing Ginnifer Goodwin, as Connie the Rubenesque one.
After a few initial dustups, most of the girls quickly fall under Watson's spell. She shows them the hot Abstract Expressionists (Pollock!) and the rule-breaking Europeans (Soutine!). She tries to help Joan secure a spot in Yale Law School -- much to the disgust of Joan's best friend, Betty, who launches repeated attacks against Roberts in her school newspaper column. Away from the classroom, the four students sit around the dorm discussing their new professor and their burgeoning sex lives with surreal candor, as Giselle slides and wraps herself around her classmates with erogenous abandon. By this point in the film, it seems unlikely that any Hollywood movie will surpass ''Mona Lisa Smile'' as the weirdest commercial film of the year. And this is before piano subversive Tori Amos shows up to sing ''Murder, He Says'' at Betty's wedding reception, and after the wonderful Juliet Stevenson, as the school nurse (and lesbian), is dismissed for supplying contraception and Marcia Gay Harden, the nutty ''speech, elocution, and poise'' instructor, gives a nightmare dinner-party tutorial.
The picture gives off the strong musk of 1968's ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,'' in which Maggie Smith is given a hard time for opening girls' minds to sex in 1930s Edinburgh. ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' however, seems like science fiction commissioned by a liberationist task force 30 years too late, though matters are more complicated than that. Each girl has her own goals and point of view on her future, and most stand in contrast to Watson's. Stiles, for one, gives an impassioned defense of her character's choice to marry that might have been meant to seem depressing, but she's such a confident actress that it almost levels the debate. To the film's credit -- Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal wrote the screenplay -- this isn't a Stepford finishing school. If we're taken back in time, so is Roberts, who brings with her a contempt for betrothal that sends ripples of exhilaration through the student body and shocks (shocks) the administration.
The reliable Mike Newell directs ''Mona Lisa Smile'' with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction. Betty is so smitten with married life that she seems a gay husband and a black gardener away from being Julianne Moore in ''Far From Heaven,'' but Dunst gives artful fervor to her stock prude. And Gyllenhaal, in the movie's smartest and most surprising performance, puts Giselle in a simmering carnivorous heat. She has all the good, unprintable lines and buckets of compassion.
In contrast to her fellow actors, Roberts is triumphantly, albeit inevitably, her screen self: clumsy and righteous. If her character's crusade to save her students from marriage is certainly her most baffling yet, it's also her most entertaining. By the film's tear-jerking conclusion, it's clear that Watson, like Roberts, must be true to who she is. If the girls at Wellesley don't need her, where next to challenge a culture's longstanding notions of marriage? It's a safe bet that she's parachuting into Kabul or Baghdad right now.
Video
