MOVIE REVIEW 'Mona Lisa' pulls off its heavy load

The director errs by mixing post-feminist values with a 1950s scenario.
By MILAN PAURICH
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
"Mona Lisa Smile" combines the all-star female cast and Ivy League collegiate setting of the 1966 movie version of Mary McCarthy's "The Group" with the "nonconformist-teacher-bucks-the-system-and-makes-a-difference" plot line of Robin Williams' "Dead Poets Society." While that's a hefty load for any mere chick-flick to carry, "Mona Lisa" pulls it off better than most ("The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" anyone?) thanks to spot-on casting, uniformly strong performances and production values to die for.
The fact that I didn't believe a single minute of it hardly matters. From the opening bars of Rachel Portman's score, which shamelessly quotes Elmer Bernstein's legendary "To Kill a Mockingbird" theme music, I knew I was suspended in movie never-never land.
In her first starring vehicle since winning the Oscar for "Erin Brockovich," Julia Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a free-spirited Berkeley grad who joins the stuffy faculty of Massachusetts' Wellesley College in 1953.
On her first day as the school's new art history professor, Katherine is startled to learn that her eager beaver students have already memorized their entire textbook -- plus all the supplementary reading materials. To throw a curveball into her syllabus, Katherine introduces them to modern art (dig that Jackson Pollock!) and even supplies valuable life lessons before the final exam. Soon she's helping Joan (Julia Stiles) apply to Yale Law School, acting as cupid for wallflower Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin) and defending the rights of Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal) to use a diaphragm.
Pulling strings
Locking horns immediately with the new-prof-on-the-block is spiteful, spoiled rich girl Betty (a truly frightening Kirsten Dunst) whose midsemester marriage to preppie Spencer (Jordan Bridges) only makes her more of a thorn in Katherine's side. Since Betty also writes an op-ed column for the school paper, she uses her public forum to condemn Katherine's radical-thinking ways. Pulling Betty's strings is her Wellesley alumnus/board member mom (Donna Mitchell) who instructs the virgin bride to turn a blind eye to Spencer's flagrant womanizing. Pushed to the breaking point, Betty has an emotional meltdown then quickly transforms herself into one of Katherine's most loyal disciples. It's like "The Stepford Wives" in reverse and just as unconvincing as it sounds.
Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner's script pulls a three-card monte in the last reel by subverting our expectations about how each subplot is going to play itself out. Rosenthal and Konner ultimately redeem their characters and elevate the movie into something more than camp.
Mixed time periods
Unfortunately, what they and director Mike ("Four Weddings in a Funeral," "Donnie Brasco") Newell have done in the process -- and this is what separates it from a masterpiece like "Far From Heaven" -- is impose post-feminist values and attitudes onto their 1950s scenario. If "Heaven" faithfully replicated the Eisenhower decade in its lush pastiche of Douglas Sirk movies like "Magnificent Obsession," "Mona Lisa" mimics the surface trappings of that era's Hollywood entertainment, while modernizing (hence betraying) the sensibility that fueled them. No fair.
Roberts gives one of her trademark "movie star" performances and is never less than charming. She's not, however, remotely credible as either a college instructor or a product of Katherine's repressive times. Dunst, Stiles and Gyllenhaal fare better, though it's relative newcomer Goodwin (TV's "Ed") who makes the most memorable impression as the star-crossed Connie.
That curious title, by the way, comes from a lecture Katherine gives her students on Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." The famously enigmatic model might look happy in the painting -- she's smiling after all -- but is she really? "Not everything is as it seems," Miss Busy-Body assures her class.
Except in New Hollywood chick-flicks, that is.
XWrite Milan Paurich at milanpaurich@aol.com.