Sharing a Mona Lisa Smile this Autumn in August

For this week’s Autumn in August entry, I decided to watch for the first time the 2003 film Mona Lisa Smile. The college setting of the story seemed to have the back to school vibe that I was looking or so I thought…

The movie stars Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson, an art teacher ready to begin her academic career at Wellesley College in 1953. From the start, the higher ups are already giving her grief over wanting to add “modern art” to her syllabus (Picasso and Jackson Pollack, oh my!) but her first class of students are quite the trial by fire there:

Eventually, Katherine starts to get the girls to do more than just quote the textbook and encourages them to want more in life than just finding a husband.

Some of her guidance is lost on Betty(Kristen Dunst), who goes all out on being the ideal Wellesley woman and is truly insufferable throughout the movie. 

Betty gets the school nurse fired for giving one of her friends birth control pills ( and she’s a terrible friend to her peers with bad advice and judgmental interference) and takes everything opportunity to shove her social status in Katherine’s face. However, Katherine refuses to take any college girl crap off of her:

Unfortunately, most of the movie doesn’t fully focus on this plot line.

Instead, we get a heaping mess of subplots that dilute the full flavor of the central story.

Some of those side trips aren’t all bad(Katherine encourages one of her students to follow through on pursuing law school) but some of them just go nowhere (another girl is dating a pushy creep who may or may not be cheating on her) and Katherine’s love life gets thrown in the mix without much influence on the overall character arc for her by the end.

Some of the better moments in this movie are when Katherine shows her students that’s more than one way to look at life and the film needed more of that. The scene where she pushes back on Betty’s newsletter critique of her is one of Katherine’s stronger speeches but without a more solid emphasis on the subject matter, it doesn’t land the knockout punch that it should:

Well, I will say that Mona Lisa Smile was worth a watch and there are plenty of good performances, with Roberts and Dunst at the top of the list, not to mention Marcia Gay Harden as a teacher of social graces who almost stole the show at some points.

It’s just a shame that MLS doesn’t earned higher than a B+ when it comes to smart storytelling. Anyway, our last AIA episode will feature The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society , of which I have better hopes of being great(particularly since I read the novel it’s based on). In the meantime, enjoy a brief glimpse of Tori Amos as a fifties style singer-quite a nice surprise indeed!: