Mona Lisa Smile: A Review

One of the major questions often asked of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is related to her smile: is she happy? It’s a legitimate question I suppose, for not everyone who smiles is happy. Far too often the smile is a cover up, a charade. Today we use the word “fine” in the same way that older generations painted on a smile. Our world is falling apart and we respond to the question “How are you” with “O, I’m fine”. But below the surface there is much more going on. It is this looking beyond the surface that the film Mona Lisa Smile (Revolution Studios, 2004) intends to promote.

In this 2004 release Julia Roberts leads an outstanding cast on the search for finding one’s self. Unfortunately the concluding message that it sends will, I believe, disappoint many. Roberts stars as Miss Katherine Watson, a “free-thinking” art history teacher who comes to teach at the conservative Wellesley College. As a period piece it magnificently portrays the early 1950s. The scenery, the girls’ college, and the dilemmas all reflect well this post-war culture. Since so few can pull off period pieces well I certainly applaud director Mike Newell and his staff. But beyond this I find little else to appreciate about this film.

The discipline of art serves as an analogy for the film. As the bold Miss Watson teaches her students that they cannot learn art by reading a textbook but only by looking beyond their initial impressions and sense experiences so she teaches them to do the same with life. Marriage is one of the big issues in the development of the plot. The young women of Katherine Watson’s class are all focused on one thing: husbands (specifically Harvard husbands). As the plot unfolds, however, the conclusion is drawn that marriage is not all its cracked up to be.

For student Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) marriage turns out to be a complete sham. Her husband is cheating on her, her mother tells her to ignore it, and pretending everything is okay eats her alive, to the point that she has a complete breakdown. It is a terribly sad scene when Betty verbally assaults her promiscuous friend with the thoughts that she is actually thinking about herself. For Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles) marriage stamps out her personal dreams. She is a stellar student with the potential to go to law school, but she turns it down to stay at home with her new husband. The one redeeming moment of the whole film comes when Joan lectures Miss Watson on her hypocrisy. As Joan sternly points out to her teacher that she is only looking at the surface of the housewife, just like they were only looking at the surface of the modern art, one gets the feeling that the film is shifting. Suddenly there comes a rainbow up from the thunderstorm of feminism in this film. But the light lasts only a moment and is gone. With barely a second comment the incident with Joan is forgotten in the film. The one redeeming quality of the film is lost in a torrential down pour of an anti-housewife conclusion.

As the story comes to a close Watson leaves Wellesley’s repressive halls, and her love interest, to travel across Europe; the “free-thinking” woman leaves with her independence intact. Betty divorces her husband, who indeed is a jerk (to say the least), and shares an apartment with the girlfriend she had previously derided. Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal), one of the other main characters of the film, continues her promiscuous affairs, one with a married man, without ever expressing any regret. Nothing, in the end, is said about marriage, the family, and all those who have represented the goodness of the home are forgotten or cast in a backwards or foolish light.

To say that a film such as this has no agenda is really to say that it was poorly written, and I do not think it was poorly written. There’s nothing wrong with the production of this film, it is a high quality production- it is, rather, the message itself that I find disappointing. Marriage, as God has ordained it, is a wonderful gift that, though only dimly, is meant to reflect the love that Jesus Christ has for His church. And though all of us fail in our marriages, any film that portrays this side as all there is to it, and as something worth avoiding, has really only seen the surface, and has sadly missed out on the real beauty beyond that surface!