Mona Lisa Smile (2003)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Written by Lawrence Kronner and Mark Rosenthal
Directed by Mike Newell
Starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ginnifer Goodwin, Dominic West, Juliet Stevenson, and Marcia Gay Harden

Features:

• Featurettes: "Art Forum," "College: Then and Now," "What Women Wanted: 1953"
  
• Music Video: Elton John's "The Heart of Every Girl"
  

My Advice: Avoid it.

Wellesley College in the late-1950s was a haven for young women to learn the traditional conservative values of being a good mother and wife. However, there is an undercurrent of academic liberalism that has begun to take hold. When Katherine Ann Watson (Roberts) arrives as the fresh, new Art History teacher, she's not prepared for the level of student commitment to both their studies and their conservatism. These are the types of students who read all of their textbooks cover to cover before the first day of classes. She makes it her goal to show them that there is more to art than what you read in a book and more to life that what someone else tells you should be.

This is a Roberts vehicle, but it really could have been played by almost anyone in Hollywood (or the rest of the country for that matter). Watching this movie, you really get the feeling the producers were hoping that this one would be a repeat of Roberts' Oscar winning performance as Erin Brockovich. There were a couple of things that kept this from happening for her: one, the writing for this movie was nothing to...er...write home about; two, Newell isn't nearly as inventive or adventurous a director as Soderbergh; and three, Roberts didn't have anyone who was close to being competition for her Oscar in 2000. She was the favored winner in what has become as much a marketing gimmick as it has a popularity contest in Hollywood.

But, I digress. Bottom line is that this movie is strictly sentimental slop. Stiles plays the same character she plays in every other movie and is constantly out-acted by Dunst who doesn't seem to be afraid to go anywhere. Stiles knows she's getting paid whether she actually does anything with her character or not. Roberts seems to have skimmed the script, gotten the general idea, and played the part very generally. The secondary players in this movie are the ones that really stand out. Marcia Gay Harden is excellent. If there's a reason to watch this movie, it's her. The story is predictable and relies heavily on other academic movies such as The Paper Chase and, dare I say (dare! dare!), Dead Poets Society. After all, it's about bucking The System.

The DVD is just as sparse as the movie itself. The features that we do get are just not worth watching. They've basically taken one featurette and split it into a few pieces to give them more to list on the back of the disc's case. The first of these is the cast of the movie talking about Art. I'm sure it was a very good idea on paper. What happens is that the cast comes across as trying to sound intellectual about Art and how their feelings about Art helped them in preparation for this movie. Obviously, it's not very impressive.

The second featurette takes a look at the world of Academia now and then. It specifically focuses on college life then as opposed to now. The main problem still exists: the cast tries to talk about the historical perspective that they applied to this script to make sure the story gets told but, again, they come across as trying to sound intellectual. The third and final featurette is perhaps some of the most self-important of the three. It's entitled "What Women Wanted: 1953". Apart from the same problems that the other featurettes have, this one goes even further into the abyss by implying that all women in 1953 wanted the exact same thing: freedom. This featurette implies...no...states as fact that women were slaves to their men and their kitchens in the early 1950s, and all they could do was to "put on a happy face" and conform to their expectations. What rubbish. I won't deny that the roots of the feminist movement can be found in the 1950s, but this featurette goes out of its way to make it sound like that white males were nothing more than slavedrivers to their spouses and cared nothing more for them. The only thing I'll say about this is that free speech is a great thing. But this is just irresponsible use of that freedom.

The right way to have handled this would have been to get some actual people who knew what they were talking about in the featurettes as well. Those bits could have been used to space out the ones from the cast. Or just leave the cast out altogether. That would have been fine, too. As it stands, it feels like they didn't want to spend the money to hire some decent talking heads and just settled for what they already had under contract.

The rest of the DVD is filled with the same kind of tripe that just bugs the crap out of me. I ask, yet again: why, after the years that DVDs have evolved, are production companies still putting music videos on DVDs as bonus material. It's just a waste of space. It would be different if the music were something spectacular or if the video itself were anything other than every other music video for a song from a movie. You know what I mean, shots of the artist intermixed with shots from the movie with no real cohesion or story told.

I would have liked a commentary on this one, just so that Newell could defend himself. But alas, there's nothing. And again, some real historical perspective might have been nice. Or even the screenwriters talking about where they were coming from.

So just look at the cover for this one and/or go see the trailers for it. You'll get the general idea behind it without having to waste your time. When you pick it up at your local rental house, just gently place it back on the shelf and move on.