Mona lisa smile - 2003

I like this movie, it’s full of good actresses and has a nice story; nothing really surprising, it’s all pretty much what you expect, but very well done. There is a part of the story that is completely useless, which is of course the little romance between Catherine and another teacher, absolutely useless, time wasted that could have been spent in another way.

The other man in Catherine’s life , on the other hand, had an interesting part, very small but meaningful. 

I explain: Catherine Watson (Julia Roberts) is the new art teacher at Wellesley college, very traditional place where of course she’s considered too unorthodox. She comes from California to “make a difference” in a college “for women who seek knowledge” … From the beginning she doesn’t like the dormitory rules so she doesn’t stay at school, she stays at another teacher’s house, renting a room. Nancy (Maria Gay Harden) teaches girls etiquette, how to speak and pose, how to sit down and how to keep a perfect house for their husbands…

The first lesson goes very badly, because everything Catherine has prepared, the girls already know all of it: they’ve never taken art history classes before, but they’ve all read the entire text (and remember it all, names and dates and everything, just like that! I’m so envious right now), so next lesson she shows them a slide of something that isn’t in the book, making them talk about what is art, who decides and all that. She makes them think and speak up their mind, and not everybody likes that.

The students are (they are all intelligent girls, so I won’t repeat it): 

—Joan (Julia Stiles): Catherine gave her the first C of her life, because in her essay she basically quoted somebody else’s opinions instead of writing her own; when Catherine reads her file to her she says “I seem like a pompous ass” - Catherine”you are, but a very busy one” or something like that :-p Joan says she hasn’t thought much about what university she’d like to get into because she plans to get married after graduation; Catherine tells her she can do both and gives her an application form for Yale. Joan herself says “I can do both” to her friend Betty while telling her she’s been accepted to Yale law school. Her boyfriend Tommy later tells Catherine he’ll have to move to Philadelphia for work, and that he’s happy for Joan: “just the fact that she got in, she’ll always have that” and “she’ll be in Philadelphia with me” so obviously not at Yale. Catherine then knocks at her door with papers of other law schools in the Philadelphia area, but Joan tells her that she’s married: Tommy and Joan eloped and got married, so it’s now out of the questions. Joan tells her that it was her choice, that he would have supported her, and that she had to make a choice because she wants a family and wants to be there for them, and “I know exactly what I’m doing and it doesn’t make me any less smart” and “you are the one that said I could do anything I wanted, this is what I want”.

She’s right, this is what feminism is about :-)

—Betty (Kirsten Dunst), the rich girl who seems so spoiled and above anybody else, she does everything her mother tells her to do, and is very hard, snob, traditionalist and with no regard for others at all: she gets the nurse Amanda (Juliet Stevenson) fired for giving girls birth pills; she’s always openly against Catherine for her modern views of life.

She gets married very soon, to Spencer. A big ceremony with everybody invited. Later, she worked to have a perfect household, taking picture for a magazine looking like the perfect housewife, but is rather upset that Spencer is always away, always going to New York saying it’s for work..

one night Betty goes home to her mother but is sort of thrown out “for her own good”: her mother tells her that Spencer’s house is now her home. 

When she makes up her mind to divorce him, her mother is against it, tells her to try for a year, tells her that what’s important is that nobody knows. Betty shows her a picture of the MonnaLisa, and asks her “is she happy? She’s smiling, she looks happy, so what does it matter?”

—Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the rebel one; her father came back from Pearl Harbor a different man, just like Catherine’s first fiancée, so her parents divorced. She had an affair with Bill, but now that he doesn’t want her anymore she has a hard time forgetting him; we see her once hiding outside his door waiting for him, to talk to him… she keeps saying that she’s fine, but she doesn’t look it. 

—Connie (Ginnifer Goodwin) who is so pretty, and yet thinks nobody will ever like her, and is very very surprised when a boy does; Charlie is Betty’s cousin: they dance together and spend time together and she likes him but then Betty tells her that he has a girlfriend, Deb McIntyre, and that he’s just using Connie and hiding her, and Connie believes her because Charlie made a big deal about not wanting Deb’s parents to see them together, so Connie stops answering his calls or letters. Some time later (don’t know how many weeks) she sees him with a girl and thinks it’s Deb, but it turns out they had already broken up when the two of them got together, and he started dating this Miranda only because Connie wouldn’t speak to him anymore. Connie is very hurt and ask Betty why couldn’t she let her be happy, but later on, when she sees Miranda with another guy, she runs to Charlie’s room in the dormitory and tells him that if he broke up with Miranda, she won’t make the same mistake twice, and they kiss :-)

There are also:

—Bill (Dominic West), the Italian teacher - he speaks a decent Italian, I could understand him, but the example they made in class made little sense. He was telling a story in Italian, about the time he spent there during the war, and when a girl said “una trappola era” he corrects her saying they must remember to invert verbs and names… which is what you should do with ‘adjectives’ and names, not verbs. Verbs go pretty much the same place. In English to say “it was a trap”, you don’t say “a trap it was” right?

Anyway, they get together even if it was pretty clear to everybody Catherine included that he had had a story with Giselle. When they start dating she simply asks his word that there will be no students while they are together… because she doesn’t want to wonder why a girl in her class has her perfume… stuff like that… which sounds to me simple jealousy, not outright indignation for a teacher sleeping with his students!! It’s 1953, does this mean that it is ok for teacher to sleep with their underage students?  Anyway, later she learns from a friend of Billy that he’s never been to San Remo, not even to Europe, he lied, and she’s very disappointed and leaves him.

—Paul (John Slattery) - Catherine’s boyfriend who stayed in California but came to see her for Christmas, a surprise she seemed to like a lot at first, but then he proposed to her and she rejected him, so he went back home.

This story had its purpose, to show that Catherine had nothing against love, that she did love someone, that she was not single simply because nobody proposed to her, but that she made her own choice, seeking something different.

Catherine gets frustrated with this college because she says she came here to teach new leaders, not their wives. At the end of the term, she’s asked  to stay another year, only because her class is full, but with so many conditions that she refuses, and at the end she leaves to go teaching in Europe, and the last scene is all the graduated girls following her taxy on their bikes to say goodbye, and Betty follows her crying, long after the other girls have stopped.

One of the best scene is Giselle/Betty confrontation. Betty is always so judgmental, so when we see Giselle seeing Spencer kissing another woman, someone might wonder ‘will she tell her?’. Soon after that, there is this scene where Betty is very mean to her (who is currently going out with an older, married man), she calls her a whore, tells her that nobody wants her, that Bill hates her, crying every word out with a passion, until Giselle comes near her… and hugs her, and keeps her tight, letting her burst into tears, saying “he doesn’t want me”, crying her heart out and hugging her in return. I thought that was an amazing scene. You could see in her face that she was upset and on the verge of tears, but she was being so mean it wasn’t easy to be sympathetic.

At the end, when Betty informs her mother that she has filed for divorce, she adds that she’ll go live in the Greenwich Village (which should mean something but not to me, I don’t know what it represents: common people??) and that Giselle will be her roommate!

During the credits, there was Elton John singing ‘the heart of every girl’.

I think all the actresses here did a very good job, they were really really good.