Although
it hardly constitutes a major genre, the academic picture, the movie about
college students and professors, remains a moderately popular form for
filmmakers and film audiences. When college flicks concentrate on students,
they tend to move into anarchic comedy or slaughterhouse horror, both entirely
suitable for the young demographic Hollywood loves so dearly. When they deal
with faculty, whether seriously or comically, however, they like to show some
version of Jerry Lewis’s nutty professor (a variant on the grand archetype of
the mad scientist). They concentrate on the necessary eccentricity of a
superior intellect, thus gratifying the essentially anti-intellectual instincts
of American popular culture.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย One
of the highly praised movies of a couple of years ago, A Beautiful Mind, showed at least a glimpse of academic research
and the work of a powerful intellect. At the same time, of course, it exploited
in its own way the stereotype of the insane genius. The two most recent films
to depict college professors, The Life of
David Gale and The Human Stain,
both featured a decidedly unorthodox and ultimately unhinged professor,
certainly untrustworthy as a mentor of the young. Even the latest college
flick, which breaks new ground in adding a female to the learned ranks of
Hollywood faculty, depends on the protagonist’s characterization as a quixotic
nonconformist, out of step with prevailing opinion and established order.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย In Mona Lisa Smile Julia Roberts plays a
new young instructor who comes from California to Massachusetts in 1953 to
teach art history to the wealthy, privileged young ladies of Wellesley College.
The time and place mean a great deal in the atmosphere of the film, which
raises a number of historical issues, most of them dealing with conformity and
repression.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Hinting
coyly at the climate of anti-Communist hysteria, some characters in the movie
use the loaded term subversion as a condemnation. Entirely concerned with the
prospect of marriage to the right young man from the right family and the right
school, most of the women regard their education simply as a polishing process,
providing a patina of gentility and culture for their adult social life.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Roberts,
something of an anomaly at Wellesley because she didn’t attend one of the Seven
Sisters colleges or do graduate work at a prestigious Eastern university, finds
her students, who all look disquietingly alike, simultaneously arrogant and
docile. They smugly resist her new ideas and are fixed on the limited goals of
upper-class domesticity. She discovers that her students already have the
textbook memorized by the first day of classes (in real life, too few students,
as any instructor will testify, even open the books), but also that they will
not examine its concepts or analyze works of art outside the mainstream of
received opinion. The faculty, typically, consists of hidebound fuddy-duddies
who frown on her interest in contemporary painting and alternative approaches
to education.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Once
the movie introduces the chief character and the situation, it distributes its
attention on a number of issues, none of which really emerges clearly or
provides much strength or focus to the narrative. The script chiefly concerns
itself with the repressive gentility of Wellesley, where the school nurse loses
her job because she provides a diaphragm to a sexually active student, a
coalition of conservative faculty and alumni oversee curriculum, and one of
Julia Roberts’s acquaintances (Marcia Gay Harden) teaches a horrible course in
etiquette.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Roberts
herself subversively encourages her students to pursue careers beyond college
rather than settling for the dubious comfort of bourgeois security and lifelong
inertia, which shocks her students, earns her the distrust of her colleagues,
and threatens her position at the college.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย While
turning the story into something like a feminist tract, the filmmakers only
touch on some other aspects of the 1950s beyond the usual clichรฉs about
sheeplike conformity — as if it were any different today — and cultural
stagnation. At least when Roberts shows her class a terrific Jackson Pollock
painting, the film hints at the spontaneity of the time, neglected by so many
commentators, when action painting, progressive jazz, Beat writing, and even
the exuberance of automotive styling expressed an entirely different aspect of
the decade. In general, however, Mona
Lisa Smile aims only at easy targets and familiar issues, settling for the
most obvious and predictable conclusions.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย One
rather unusual element in the film, which many other movies about the time
neglect, is the lingering presence of World War II, still very much a recent
event, haunting the memories of the characters. Women speak of their lovers or
fiancรฉs dying in the war, and a professor who romances Roberts builds his
mystique around the fiction that he was wounded in the Italian campaign.
Although the movie looks most attractive in a tweedy New England way and Julia
Roberts seems quite sincere, the memory of the war provides perhaps the only
genuinely original and potentially compelling concept in Mona Lisa Smile.
Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts,
Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dominic West, Juliet Stevenson,
Marcia Gay Harden, John Slattery; written by Lawrence Konner and Mark
Rosenthal; directed by Mike Newell. Cinemark Tinseltown; Hoyts Greece Ridge; Loews
Webster; Pittsford Plaza Cinema; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal Eastview; Regal
Henrietta.
You
can hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5 Fridays at 7:20 a.m.,
rerun on Saturdays at 8:50 a.m.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2003.
