Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile arrives at Wellesley in 1953 with a lesson plan and a firm belief that the lecture hall is a place of moral instruction. Julia Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a UCLA graduate who discovers her students have memorized the textbook before she has opened it, and who responds by teaching them modern art, self-determination, and the radical notion that a woman might want a career alongside a husband. The film is not subtle about its intentions. It is a two-hour seminar in which the syllabus is women's independence and the final exam is whether the audience has been moved.

On that front it is thorough. The screenplay builds its drama around gender roles, marriage as trap, and the quiet rebellion of women who choose differently. Betty Warren, played with clenched-jaw conviction by Kirsten Dunst, spends the first act defending the old order and the last act filing for divorce. Joan Brandwyn gets into Yale Law and declines it, and the film treats the decision as her own, which is a more honest note than the genre usually permits. The teaching is explicit, the speeches are frequent, and the message is delivered without a whisper of ambiguity. What the cast is not, however, is varied. The ensemble is female and formidable, and it is also almost entirely white, a student body assembled by a casting director who never left the Northeast.

Elsewhere the film lets the other progressive markers pass it by. There is no engagement with race, no environmental concern, no economic critique, no interest in bodies or minds that deviate from the norm, and no same-sex longing among the Wellesley women, who are given heterosexual romance as their only available conflict. It is a period piece that argues its case and then leaves the room. The argument is earnest. The execution is soft. The film asks us to feel inspired, and inspiration, like a good lecture, is hard to sustain for two hours.