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Mona Lisa Smile
Movie
Mona Lisa Smile
Director
Mike Newell
Cast
Julia Roberts, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, Marcia Gay Harden

By Subhash K Jha


An unhappy young wife from an aristocratic family Betty (Kirsten Dunst) points a picture of Mona Lisa to her imperturbable mother. "She’s smiling, mother. But is she happy?"

Mona Lisa Smile is about poses that woman assume in a repressed state to express themselves through the filters and formats invented by convention. Set in conservative pre-feminist America, the film doesn’t really cover new ground. But it covers the old in ambrosial feelings, some of it reminiscent of Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, though Mona Lisa Smile is far cuter than that other film.

Fortunately its cuteness doesn’t get cloying. Though Mona Lisa Smile lacks the spontaneous outburst of a spring shower that director Mike Newell created in Four Weddings And A Funeral it’s got a glorious gallery of woman of all ages expressing repression and yearning through their eyes and their body language.

Remarkably, Newell creates a specific period without making his narrative a slave to it. The actors slip into a specific school of thought with a fluency that furnishes a flouncy richness to the films muted tapestry of time and feelings.

A lot of the plot’s polemics on women’s rights appears terribly redundant in today’s age and context. Newell has taken a tremendous risk in recreating a time and moment in history whose significance over the years has transformed beyond analysis or retrospection.

There are tender momemts of glorious cinema in the film that you want to hold close to your heart. Newell doesn’t let you. He captures an ethos of ephemeral emotions that transcend their timorous destiny to attain a feeling of wispy timelessness.

That Julia Roberts plays Katherine Watson is an undisguised blessing. She’s a radical teacher in a New England school trying to use her skills as an art teacher to fill her students’ life with thoughts and ideas on progress and creative independence.

Her opinionated self-regard projected on those around her sometimes seems irksome. And when she persuades one of her students to pursue her promising career as a lawyer after marriage the girl turns around asks, "What makes you think being a wife and having my family isn’t equally fulfilling for me?"

At the end, though, the girl does go to law school. And all the other students find the paradise that feminist polemics demand of them. That’s what keeps Mona Lisa Smile distanced from the greatness that it aspires to. The film just doesn’t rise above stereotypical definitions of feminine selfgratification.

In another very fine film on female empowerment The Hours, the women from the past sought their identity without looking the least representational. In Mona Lisa Smile the brood of girls, albeit memorable in their vivid selfassertion, never rise fully above their textures of triteness.

And still the film creates a kind of self-contained magic. A sequence such as the one where the married heiress first abuses her promiscuous friend and then sobs on her shoulder, is carried off with such effulgence and elan, you don’t only overlook the film’s flamboyant stereotypes but even celebrate them with the director.

This isn’t the first time that Julia Roberts has played a woman projecting a feisty feminist attitude. In this film she plays her character far less broadly than the tart in Pretty Woman or the political activist in Erin Brockovich. Reflective, shy and persuasive she creates a character whom we can gaze at beyond the typifications assigned to her by the plot.

The other actors are all fine creatures of spontaneity. I specially lacked Marcia Gay Harden as Julia Roberts’ live-in companion who prefers to spend to live her life through the idiot box.

In the week of women and their empowerment Mona Lisa Smile is a joyous tribute to the spirit of nostalgic feminism. Its special regard for its characters and its ability to create a feeling of unbridled joy and release at the end of the river, keep us sailing...and smiling.