Maybe it's because I just don't exactly like Julia Roberts movies, but I did not like Mona Lisa Smile. Instead of the touching moving story that it presented itself as, it was little more than an overly caricatured pseudo-feminist fluff piece masquerading as something of substance.
For those who haven't seen the movie, the brief synopsis is that Julia Roberts plays a first year art history professor who's trying to get through to her over-acheieving Wellsley students in the early 1950s. We, the audience, are expected to be appalled at how backward they were in the '50s, and to applaud good ol' Julia's attempts to get everyone to get with the program.
Therein lies the problem. Rather than bothering to even acknowledge the complexities of the time period or even attempting to understand the historical and cultural forces that were shaping the era, the film simply sets up a caricature of the 1950s, and creates cardboard cutout stereotypes of the people living in that time. Into the stereotyped scene with the cookie cutter characters steps Julia Roberts, who tries to enlighten her students by introducing them to modern art and making them question who decides what is and isn't art, and somehow questioning the nature of art is all supposed to be magically freeing or something so that they are able to break out of their Wellsley-finishing-school-mold.
The movie is supposed to warm our feminist hearts, but by the end of the movie, I was questioning whether it was promoting a feminist message or if it was really a veiled attempt at an anti-feminist message. Despite purporting to be about breaking out of the conventional stereotypes of women, in the end, all it did was continue a bunch of stereotypes. At a particularly dramatic moment, Julia Robert's character shows her class several advertisements which she was arguing were telling women that they had to dress and act a certain way. One advertisement was telling women that wearing that particular brand of girdle was "freeing," a sentiment that we were supposed to be appalled by. This coming in a speech giving by an actress who has had plastic surgery to make her lips fuller. Not only that, the movie perpetuates the lookist stereotypes because the one slightly plump character has a hard time finding boyfriends, while all the beautiful characters have guys aplenty. No, women don't wear girdles today, we are told that we should just go and have plastic surgery to conform to the ideal woman as described by Hollywood. Julia Robert's character goes around telling her students that they can have both family and career, but by the end of the movie, the director has made it clear that said claim is impossible, as Julia Robert's character doesn't ever get beyond the committmentless hookup, and it's made pretty clear that she can't have both relationships or work, and conversely, the character played by Julia Stiles chooses marriage over law school, telling Julia Roberts that she knows what she wants, and what she wants isn't to be a lawyer it's to get married and have a family and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
In the end, Mona Lisa Smile never got past the stereotypes to give a movie with real heart and feeling. Not only that, I left the theater thinking "if that's feminism, I want absolutely nothing to do with it."
Posted by kathryn at Enero 7, 2004 01:44 AM | TrackBack