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Movie Reviews
| Mona Lisa Smile. Dir. by Mike Newell. Columbia Pictures, 2003. 117 mins.
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| As the credits roll at the end of Mona Lisa Smile, the audience is treated to film clips from the 1950s. Shots from the TV show Queen for a Day, advertisements, vacuuming contests for the Mrs. America title, weddings and babies, and pictures of Levittown remind us of the iconic 1950s at the heart of the movie. Contemporary historians have been trying to tell us that the 1950s was a more complicated decade than the one conveyed by those now-familiar images. The film under review both adds to this work of revision and undermines it. |
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Mona Lisa Smile gives us the young college professor Katherine Ann Watson, played by Julia Roberts, who offers her female students a fresh look at art along with alternatives to their seemingly preordained futures as wives and mothers. Set in the academic year 1953–1954, it engages the rebellious energy of abstract expressionism and the determination of one art historian to get her students to think freshly. What makes this film about teaching unusual is that here, unlike in Dead Poets Society (1989) or Educating Rita (1983), a woman teaches and inspires female students. There are several compelling moments when the female professor challenges her students to question conventional wisdom and, rather than cite authorities, think for themselves. |
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The feminist content of the film has been the focus of many film reviews. At one level, the message of self-realization that the young art historian delivers in fictional 1953 is the one that Betty Friedan highlighted ten years later in The Feminine Mystique, and much of the portrait of the women's college seems to fit Friedan's chapter "The Sex-Directed Educators." Reflecting on (and misrepresenting) her own 1957 return to Smith College, Friedan found 1950s students unwilling to engage in intellectual discussion and passive in the classroom, imagining their futures only as wives. She blamed educators for bending girls' aspirations to societal demands of domestic adjustment. |
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That the film is set at Wellesley College has engaged the college's alumnae, and they have argued vigorously and successfully in the press that, in contrast to the representation in the film, Wellesley in the 1950s welcomed the new in art. But so, too, did corporate America, finding its abstractions more palatable than the leftist realism that had preceded it. In the film Wellesley is really a stand-in for the conservative eastern establishment, challenged in the film by a "bohemian from California." The fantasy the film has to tell is of a beautiful thirty-something professor coming from the wilds of Oakland, California, to set the eastern world afire. To fulfill that task, Wellesley has to be "the most conservative college in the nation." The irony to this East-West dichotomy is that it was the male president of Mills College in Oakland, Lynn White, whose infamous rhetoric consigned women's higher education to the function of adjunct to the kitchen, while Wellesley's president in the 1950s, Margaret Clapp, bravely upheld the liberal arts ideal for women. |
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Wellesley's campus is gloriously portrayed in the film. Like other women's colleges in an era of single-sex education, the college enjoyed high prestige and possessed beautiful buildings. Along with other liberal arts colleges, Wellesley put an emphasis on teaching in the intimate setting of the classroom—the spontaneous interplay among professor, materials, and students. Like similar schools, Wellesley was committed to the development of the whole person and the building of character. In a like manner, it too had shaped policies and procedures about hiring, promotion, and tenure that brought it into line with standards set by the American Association of University Professors. What made Wellesley distinctive among women's colleges were founding features that were still alive in the 1950s: the prominence of women in powerful positions on the faculty and in the administration; a Christian orientation, still written into its bylaws; and a tradition of welcoming "calico girls," the less affluent middle-class students favored by the college's founder. |
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