'Mona Lisa Smile' sags, but acting and 1950s score give moviegoers a lift

Friday, December 19, 2003

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Julia Roberts' new star vehicle, "Mona Lisa Smile," is a strangely mixed blessing filled with glossy production values and vibrant supporting performances but suffers mightily from a lack of credibility and the grinding predictability of its plot.

MOVIE REVIEW

MONA LISA SMILE

DIRECTOR: Mike Newell

CAST: Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst,

Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal,

Marcia Gay Harden

RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for sexual content and thematic issues

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, Everett 9, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Metro, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza 12, Renton Village, South Hill Mall, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B-

It's another noble teacher drama, a kind of "Mr. Chips" meets "The Group," set in the 1953-54 school year at Wellesley College -- a time and place that the movie portrays as being as alien and threatening as the Fires of Mordor.

Roberts plays an art history instructor who comes to this most exclusive and conservative of the era's women's colleges from the Bohemian West Coast, filled with liberal, feminist values and a nebulous desire "to make a difference."

She's soon shocked to find, however, that the place is less a bastion of free thought and progressive learning than a kind of "finishing school" for the wives-to-be of the nation's elite. Naturally, she shakes things up, and is soon regarded as a subversive.

Director Mike Newell ("Enchanted April") is noted for his strong women's performances, and this film is full of them -- especially Kirsten Dunst, who is just magnificently venomous as Julia's chief student antagonist and the embodiment of everything bad about the '50s.


	Julia Roberts, left, plays an art teacher at Wellesley College, while Julia Stiles, center, plays a student torn between becoming an attorney or a trophy wife.

There's also impressive work from Julia Stiles, as a young woman torn between being a trophy wife and a lawyer; Maggie Gyllenhaal as the most self-destructively promiscuous of the group; and Marcia Gay Harden as a comically vacuous instructor in the art of housewifery.

And the movie is almost worth seeing for its soundtrack, which is packed with such delightful (and rarely heard these days) pre-rock pop standards as "Mona Lisa," "You Belong to Me," "Besame Mucho," "Secret Love" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

But it's a formula ritual, and Julia is not even remotely believable as a '50s character. She's so much a woman of our time that she seems to have been dropped in via a time machine, and you wouldn't be surprised to see her carrying a Starbucks' cup.

The modern star vehicle, of course, dictates that the star must be likable in all instances. But by stripping her of any trace of '50s bigotry or any other unsympathetic quality -- by making her so totally 2003 point of view on the 1950s -- "Mona Lisa Smile" rings very false.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.