Movies into Film

Mona Lisa Smile

Directed by Mike Newell

USA, 2003

Cognac-Laced Sugar Cubes

(Photos: Columbia Pictures)

The afternoon before I caught a preview screening of Mona Lisa Smile, the film wherein Julia Roberts plays an Art History professor at Wellesley (circa 1953), my own alma mater—the University of Georgia—sent me a copy of “Park Hallmarks,” a newsletter from my old stomping ground the English department. Designed to keep alumni in the know, this latest edition related the story of a veteran professor traveling across Europe on a train bound for Paris. She and her companions spoke little to no French, yet a native couple insisted on engaging them in conversation. As an icebreaker of sorts, the Europeans offered the Georgians a gift of sugar cubes to be dipped in cognac. Apparently, after ingesting an untold number of these cognac-laced confections, the genteel American ladies were soon fluently Gallic.

Mona Lisa Smile operates very much in a similar milieu. The language learned here, however, is modern art. Professor Julia loosens up her conservative charges toward a consideration (if not an appreciation) of Pollack and Soutine. In fact, this may be the only movie you’ll ever see where a Jackson Pollack canvas is swooned over and sentimentalized; Julia has a near-religious experience as she beholds his trademark jagged curlicues, and the syrupy score resounds with soft, moony oboes for the benefit of the uninitiated. Is this a desired state of affairs?

Itself the cinematic equivalent of a refrigerator magnet, Mona Lisa Smile exists solely to make us smile, and that small task the moviemakers handle reasonably well. The performances, costumes and sets transcend the hack screenwriting, mediocre directing and occasionally abysmal editing.

Let us be concerned mainly with the actors. As Wellesley students, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal stand out. Stiles, as a conventional girl who at least fathoms stepping beyond her ready-made future as a wife and mom, actually has a role to play; Gyllenhaal, essaying a generic bad-girl free spirit, doesn’t. Yet what wonders the latter works with mere turns of the head or flickers within her eyes. It’s exciting to watch Gyllenhaal whip up something out of nothing.

The magnificent Maggie Gyllenhaal (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

Elsewhere, Marcia Gay Harden (who was once in a good Pollack movie) intermittently suggests that she’s having a fine time in the underwritten parody she’s asked to play (a home economics teacher with no marriage prospects and not much interest in life) and Kirsten Dunst, in the bitch role, seems ripe for satire (“first, Greenwich Village—then, law school”) that never happens.

There’s much talk throughout the film about bucking traditions. Yet Mona Lisa Smile, in spite of a few entertaining slide shows, is as formulaic as movies of this caliber are wont to be. And that brings us back to Julia Roberts. Julia moves through her catalog of stock mannerisms quite capably. As with her admirer the late Katharine Hepburn—another actress oft accused of spinning endless variations of self into her screen roles—Julia has, over the years, deepened into playing Julia so skillfully that few objections can be raised. Her understated slow burn has become not only a constant, but also a comfort; it’s her signal that she won’t take injustice lying down. The central, charming concept (notice I don’t say “idea”) of Mona Lisa Smile is that it places this well-known Julia archetype within the context of an intellectual funhouse. She may be a familiar woman; thank God, nonetheless, she’s on the side of truth and beauty. Although a tad more cognac, I suspect, would have helped. – NPT

November 25, 2003

Movies into Film

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