Monster_ZERO
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2002
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- 1,306
Is this film worth a look see in the theaters or should I wait to rent a DVD copy in a few months?
I found a couple of reviews:
Are these reviews not fair? If you saw and liked the movie, what made it enjoyable to you?
I found a couple of reviews:
Why filmmakers have chosen this particular moment to become fascinated with the Eisenhower era is puzzling. Whatever the case, the latest film to peer back a half-century is Mona Lisa Smile. Unlike the more ambitious Far From Heaven, this film from the usually adventurous director Mike Newell is content to recycle familiar thematic ideas about that era's zeal for conformity and the limited options available to women from the social upper crust.
With an all-star cast that includes Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Marcia Gay Harden, the movie should develop shapely legs. However, rote characterizations and a trite, even condescending, attitude toward that era's misguided mores robs the film of the satiric punch Todd Haynes delivered in Far From Heaven. Newell is in top form, though, moving the story along at a brisk clip and nicely delineating the characters and subplots. But Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal's screenplay lacks any insight into what motivated either the enthusiasm for conformity or the rebellion against those attitudes.
The film's feminist heroine, Katherine Watson (Roberts), journeys from California to the New England campus of Wellesley College in 1953 to teach art history. She labors under the misapprehension that her students, the "best and brightest" young women in the country, seek higher education as a means toward careers. To her horror, she discovers that the primary goal of her charges is to get married.
Her students comprise the female stereotypes of that era: snobbish debutante Betty (Dunst), smart girl Joan (Stiles), bad girl Giselle (Gyllenhaal) and shy wallflower Connie (newcomer Ginnifer Goodwin). The closet lesbian also is represented, albeit as school nurse Amanda (Juliet Stevenson), who has the audacity to hand out contraception to students.
Despite an advanced curriculum at Wellesley, the pivotal class belongs to Katherine's roommate, poise and elocution teacher Nancy Abbey (Harden), a spinster carrying a torch for the fellow who jilted her long ago. Battle lines form quickly. Simply by being over 30 and unmarried, Katherine is labeled "subversive." By teaching Picasso and Jackson Pollack, her class becomes an affront to social orthodoxy.
Katherine and newlywed Betty become immediate enemies because Betty feels threatened by her teacher's feminist independence. Meanwhile, Giselle lives the life Katherine preaches as she smokes cigarettes, dates a male professor and later a married man. Joan gets caught in the middle when Katherine pushes her to apply to Yale Law School despite an imminent proposal from her boyfriend. Connie actually lands a boyfriend only for mean-spirited Betty to interfere, mostly as a reaction to her own failing marriage.
These mini-soap operas serve mostly to belabor '50s social rigidity. The film's dogged insistence in re-fighting the cultural wars of the '50s without shedding any new light on either side reduces nearly all the characters to shallow mouthpieces for predictable points of view.
Roberts' Katherine is much too strident to gain much sympathy despite her "modern" attitudes. Katherine at least is shown in an unflattering light as she holds up impossible standards for any male suitor to meet and has a stubborn streak. Gyllenhaal gets to steal the show as the bad girl - bad girls usually do. Dunst and Stiles enliven but cannot deepen their cliched characters. Goodwin manages touching moments as the lovelorn Connie.
Cinematography, art and costumes splendidly celebrate the early-'50s look without completely mocking the era. The one period element the film revels in is a fine collection of '50s pop tunes that bridge scenes and punctuate all that was lively and hip in that era.
Kirk Honeycutt
The Hollywood Reporter
Creeping 1953 Feminism, Without Quite Dispelling Dreams of Prince Charming
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
( of The New York Times )
''You can bake your cake and eat it too!'' says the reassuring slogan that distills the comfy revisionist feminism informing ''Mona Lisa Smile.'' That slogan is repeated empathically enough to qualify as the defining mantra of a movie that pretends to be audacious. And the lurking duplicity in that loaded word ''bake'' (remember Hillary Rodham Clinton's sarcastic remarks about baking cookies?) winds up applying to the movie itself. Like ''Down With Love'' earlier this year, ''Mona Lisa Smile'' preaches disruptive female self-empowerment out of one side of its mouth while out of the other it invokes the dream of being swept up, up and away by Prince Charming.
A miscast but irresistible Julia Roberts stars as Katherine Watson, a free-spirited Californian who moves East to teach at demure, snooty Wellesley College in 1953 and shakes up the place enough to be deemed subversive by the institution's hawk-eyed thought police. The insistence with which Katherine presses her mildly progressive agenda at the elite women's college makes her a kind of academic Erin Brockovich, or so the movie wants us to believe. And in her art history classes, which inspire the screenplay's most intelligent writing, she challenges her students to do more than simply identify paintings shown in slides.
Why is an original van Gogh a work of art and a reproduction not? she asks. And where does a do-it-yourself, paint-by-numbers van Gogh fit into the scheme of things? The early 50's also brought the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism, and the appearance of a Jackson Pollock canvas on campus stirs up ripples of controversy.
But Katherine's biggest boo-boo has nothing to do with notions of aesthetics. Arriving at Wellesley, she is appalled to discover that almost to a person, her brilliant, privileged students have no postgraduate ambitions beyond settling down with Mr. Right, having babies and baking sugar cakes for hubby. Her rebellion culminates with an indignant, heretical slide show of vintage magazine ads displaying perky, smiling Stepford wives reigning like queens in their immaculate kitchens.
The movie, which opens nationally today, was directed by Mike Newell, whose popular films ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' and ''Enchanted April'' tease you with the same glimmerings of something loftier before settling into a warm and fuzzy niche. Like his fellow Briton Richard Curtis (''Love, Actually,'' ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' ''Notting Hill'' and the screenplay of ''Four Weddings''), Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.
A star-watcher's guilty pleasure, the movie rubs together three of Hollywood's brightest younger stars -- Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal, all playing Wellesley seniors -- and throws in an appealing newcomer, Ginnifer Goodwin. Topping off this marshmallow sundae are vivid turns by Marcia Gay Harden as the world's prissiest (and weepiest) teacher of elocution and poise, Juliet Stevenson as the discreetly lesbian school nurse with progressive ideas about birth control, and that empress of hauteur, Marian Seldes, playing the intransigently starchy college president. Dominic West, as a carnivorous-eyed professor of Italian who sleeps with his students, gives the movie its requisite shot of testosterone.
If Ms. Roberts is the undisputed star of ''Mona Lisa Smile,'' she graciously allows her acolytes plenty of opportunity to sparkle. Each plays a specific type. Ms. Dunst is Betty Warren, a vicious, overprivileged alpha girl and archtraditionalist hellbent on marriage to a louse, who attacks Katherine in the college newspaper.
Ms. Stiles is Joan Brandwyn, Betty's best friend and Katherine's protégée, who finds herself torn between marriage and Yale Law School. Ms. Gyllenhaal, who almost steals the movie, plays Giselle Levy, the wised-up class rebel who sleeps around and almost loses her bearings. Ms. Goodwin's character, Connie Baker, is the house wallflower (and chief victim of Betty's cruelty) who can't believe it when a boy asks her out. Although the four are stock figures, the talented actresses shade their stereotypes enough to lend them as much humanity as the formulaic screenplay (by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal) permits.
As the story follows Katherine through her first year at Wellesley, there are enough reversals to keep you guessing which characters will escape this upscale cuckoo's nest, although it's not very hard to figure out. Although Ms. Roberts is playing a grown-up academic, the aura she wafts is as ingenuous as ever. She is still the wide-eyed but feisty people's princess and angel of common sense whose high-beam smile can melt steel. Think of ''Mona Lisa Smile'' as ''The Best of Everything'' meets ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.'' Or better yet, ''Goodbye, Little Miss Chips.''
Are these reviews not fair? If you saw and liked the movie, what made it enjoyable to you?