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Watson is a "forward thinking liberal" from sunny California - finding herself in a land where women are educating themselves for the sole purpose of marrying well and then making no use of their intellect.

Surprisingly written by two men (Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal), the movie has an all-star cast: Roberts, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal (you will be hearing a lot about her in the future), and Marcia Gay Harden... battling their way through the 1950s mentality of girdles, washing machines and pipe-smoking, well-bred husbands.

Intending to ace their way through college so they can get on with producing heirs, Watson's students have already memorized the text and syllabus, so Watson re-writes their lesson plan and annoys everyone on campus with her feather-ruffling, "subversive" ideas.

I was expecting this film to be a preachy feminist diatribe, but it wasn't. It was about lust vs. love, loyalty vs. society, and heart-felt emotion vs. hiding behind a sweet smile and a stony heart. The film does not present marriage as a farce or promescuity as the preferred option - rather it embraces the idea that a woman can have a family AND still learn and grow and be more than a proper hostess and trophy wife.

Watson is not portrayed as the all-wise, all-knowing, always-right person - rather she is someone who awakens her students to the possibility that they can do more than be consumers and baby factories - they can know and understand art and radical ideas - without having to like either... but at least to have a more rounded view of life than the narrow objectives portrayed on television and print media at the time.

In the mid-1950s (when this movie is set), Watson's subversive notions do not make her popular with the staff, but they make her very popular with most of her students.

While there is no nudity and only a couple of "bad" words used, there are mature themes and lots of implied non-traditional sexual relationships, so parents should be aware.

While I am always impressed with Julia Roberts' acting ability, and even though she was the lead - I really think it will be Maggie Gyllenhall and newcomer Ginnifer Goodwin (Connie Baker) that will be most noted for their performances in this film - believable, flawless and truly stellar. Topher Grace ("That 70's Show," "Traffic") makes another impressive (albeit small) appearance into a substantial film, ironically the love interest of Julia Stiles as was the case in "Traffic" and Tori Amos has a brief singing role.

In the end, this is a sweet, feel-good movie peppered with some bitter-sweet moments. Make sure you stay for the credits featuring old film reels of 1950s women in action.


THOSE FIFTIES WOMEN...   June 5, 2004
 30 out of 33 found this review helpful

My daughter, who had seen this film and loved it, suggested that we watch it together. I agreed and was very glad I did so, as I really enjoyed this bittersweet film. It is a well-acted, well-directed effort about a free-thinking art history professor, Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), who in the nineteen fifties, lacking Ivy League credentials, manages, through a twist of fate, to get a berth as a professor at traditional and conservative Wellesley College. It is here that she hopes to find herself instructing the leaders of tomorrow.

What she finds, instead, is a group of highly intelligent, young women, who are more interested in marrying the leaders of tomorrow than in being leaders themselves. Ms. Watson succeeds in opening the minds of her students to the possibilities and choices life can offer and learns a little about such possibilities and choices herself. She also finds friendship and romance while at Wellesley College. The film also focuses on four of her students, all of whom are given stellar portrayals by the young actresses playing them.

Elizabeth "Betty" Warren (Kirsten Dunst) is the quintessential fifties girl, obsessed with getting her Mrs. before getting her BA. She later discovers that one should be careful for what one wishes. She is also a nasty piece of work who doesn't care what misery for others her poison pen invectives and barbed comments cause. She eventually gets her comeuppance in a way that she never envisioned. Her best friend, Joan Brandwyn (Julia Styles), is a beautiful, highly intelligent, young woman who harbors a secret wish to become a lawyer. Yet, at the same time, she desperately wants to become a wife and mother. Hers is a decision between choices. She ultimately makes a choice that causes Ms. Watson some consternation but with which she is happy. Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a young Jewish miss in a WASP environment who finds herself having short term affairs with her hunky professor and with an older, married man. Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a pleasingly plump, pretty cellist who finds true love, only to find it derailed by the ever evil Betty.

Marcia Gay Harden is brilliant in the supporting role of Nancy Abbey, Wellesley College's professor of etiquette and deportment, who, one discovers, has not always followed her own staid advice. Noted British actress, Juliet Stevenson, is outstanding in the small role of Amanda Armstrong, the college nurse and closet lesbian, who is still mourning the loss of her companion of many years. Marian Seldes is perfectly cast as President Jocelyn Carr, whose role at the college seems to be that of keeping the well-heeled alumni and trustees of Wellesley College happy with the status quo. Donna Mitchell turns in a stunning performance as Betty's self-absorbed mother, a woman who is a slave to the expected and puts appearances before her daughter's happiness. Julia Roberts is luminous as the role of Katherine Watson, infusing it with an intelligence and natural warmth that radiates off the screen. Though she has a little bit too contemporary an edge, she still manages to carry the day in the role of the forward thinking professor with the Mona Lisa smile.

All in all, this is a wonderful, highly enjoyable film in which the social mores and style of the nineteen fifties are well depicted.


nothing to say, and two hours to say it   December 3, 2003
 29 out of 47 found this review helpful

Perhaps the one good thing about this movie is the splendid joke of casting Julia Roberts in a film with the title "Mona Lisa Smile". Whether she uses it to grin or pout, Roberts' wall-to-wall mouth has got to be one of the least subtle and mysterious in all of Hollywood. Jack Nicholson's might run a close second.
Beyond that, there's really very little to recommend this film. The word "lackluster" isn't quite strong enough to describe what director Mike Newell has put together. There are plenty of movies out there with nothing to say, but this one has achieved a rare, almost perfect hollowness. Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a free-thinking "bohemian", who comes to the elitist Wellesley College in 1953 to teach Art History. What she finds is a training camp for future Stepford wives, and soon she is on a mission to liberate their minds by getting them to ponder such radical questions as "what is art?" Mixed in with this, we get several little mini-dramas involving her students and their romantic entanglements, as well as Katherine's ill-considered romance with Bill Dunbar (Dominic West). Dunbar seems to be the only male teacher at Wellesley, and he takes this as a license to use the school as his personal harem. Katherine knows he's a sleazebag, but, being a free spirit with nothing better to do, decides to sleep with him anyway. You go girl.
What is so profoundly annoying about this film is that it pretends to be about non-conformism, a "dare to be yourself" movie, but it dares absolutely nothing. It's bad enough to subject the world to a watered-down version of "Dead Poets Society" made with an all-female cast, and it's especially bad to do so without adding a single original idea. But how dare Newell serve up a feast of cliches and try to pass it off as a homage to free thought? The students and their personal dilemmas seem to be pulled right out of the Hollywood-stereotype bag: we have the Overachiever, the Tramp, the Comic Relief, and the Stuck-Up-One-Who-Has-a-Dramatic-Change-of-Heart-and-Becomes-a-Better-Person-In-The-End. We get regrettably tired dialog, and occasional splashes of feminist ideas which, as feminism, might have been daring for the 19th century but not for 1953, and in 2003 they wouldn't even get you in the door of a Judy Chicago retrospective. (It's interesting to note that, in Watson's art history class, the only the works of male artists are shown. It's also interesting to note that the director and screenwriters are all men-- not that it means they've got any bias here, I'm just saying that it's interesting.)
At one point in the film, Watson singles out for criticism a paint-by-numbers kit for van Gogh's "Sunflowers", lamenting how our society has replaced the passion of art with a regimented, follow-the-rules mentality. This film has more in common with that kit than it would like to admit. At the end, as Watson bids farewell to her class, each student presents her with a version of the van Gogh (each in that student's own style, we're given to believe). "How else will you remember us?" they ask. Good call, ladies. I was having a hard time remembering you twenty minutes after I left the theater.


Plastic Smiles, Plastic Plot, Plastic Characters   December 3, 2003
 25 out of 38 found this review helpful

Given my profound admiration of Julia Roberts and my enthusiasm for material that provides thoughtful insight into the shallowness of so much that seems to constitute the American Dream, it may come as some surprise that I am so critical of this movie. In fact, all that I can find to compliment are the stunning skills of Julia Roberts, convincing as always--so much so that you forget you are watching her and actually believe in the person she portrays, and the intent of the screenplay writer, admirable in its correct depiction of an educational institution devoted to a purpose so devoid of any real meaning.

Unfortunately, the skills of the director, and perhaps of the screenwriter as well have limited the actual film to an almost ludicrously two dimensional portrayal of virtually all the characters in the movie, and have created a story so hyperbolic in nature as to render the plot comedy at times when it should be serious and pathetic at times when it pretends to humour. In the opening scene we are supposed to believe that every student in this fine university have acually read and mastered the assignment for the first class in its entirety, memorizing to perfection dates and styles of art going back to the 15th century BC.

Later, we are expected to believe that the Italian Professor (Mike Newell) who has exhibited absolutely nothing in the film worthy of the attentions of the thinking, caring, highly intellectual professor which is Katherine Watson, succeeds not only in seducing her but in further maintaining a relationship lasting for a period of several months.

Finally, we are expected to believe that Betty (Kirsten Dunst) who has consistently been portrayed as the acquiescing member of high society, consistently scornful, indeed derisive of her professor suddenly becomes her ardent admirer and is willing to turn to her for support and advice just because she has given up on her marriage and broken bonds with her domineering mother. Possible, yes, but the film here, as in so many other scenes, fails to provide any transitional material explaining the change in attitude or behaviour.

The one sequence that most significantly varies, refreshingly, from this is that where Joan (Julia Stiles) boldly challenges Katherine's (Julia Roberts) teaching as that of imposing her own values on others rather than that which she claims to be doing--teaching students to find their own way.

To be certain, taken on the strength of their individual performances, there were a number of reasonably good appearances by key actors and actresses. There were a few good scenes in the movie and its fundamental message was one with which many of its viewers will be no doubt inclined to agree. Unfortunately, only one performance could be described as brilliant (that of the inimitable Julia) and the film as a whole bears no comparison with the likes of Mr. Holland's Opus, a masterpiece of drama, believable, human and multidimensional throughout. Alas, this could have been such a rich fabric of natural fibers rather than the plastic imitation that it is.


Beating a dead horse- Male bashing, anti marriage film.   December 26, 2003
 23 out of 76 found this review helpful

This film uses the 50's as a set up for some cheesey hollywood rightous indignation. This film is as if Erin Brockovich travels through time to stop the evil institution of marriage. All men are slimy cheaters and all female students are kissing and touching eachother in a sexual way. Great acting from a great cast is wasted on this cliche' film. Why attack the fifties? Why set a film in the fifties if you hate them as the filmmakers do. Every 50's icon is viewed with a smirky contempt. You have to wonder what the point of making a film that condems the innocence of the 50's is, when we already live in the jaded opposite of the 50's.