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What all these women are doing in Mona Lisa Smile is a bit of a mystery, but it involves very beautiful costumes.
The year is 1953. Red lipstick all around. Roberts plays a professor of Fine Art at Wellesley College, an Ivy League school which was, in those days, for women only. Very toney.
Roberts' character is from California. She is considered an outsider in this East Coast haute wasp atmosphere, and it is made clear to her from the beginning that she is not the school's first choice for her teaching position. And so on.
She is passionate about teaching and about art. She introduces her students to modern works -- Picasso and even Pollock -- for which she gets into trouble. (This is Marcia Gay Harden's second brush with Pollock on the big screen, but that's another story).
Roberts' students are mostly bright, spoiled young women with a future in marrying well. The film is set in a time when women became wives; those doomed to the working world mostly became teachers or nurses. You are meant to root for the young women who buck convention and pursue things like law school. You are also meant to root for the bright, cello-playing ones who aren't the prettiest, but pursue true love anyway. What the hell.
Kirsten Dunst plays a privileged bitch who works hard to protect the status quo and make life tough for Roberts' free-spirit, unmarried character.
Julia Stiles plays a young woman who gets into law school but chooses a traditional marriage instead, and defends her choice. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the only really interesting character in the story -- a sort of liberated woman, before her time -- and she plays it well.
Anyway, what this is about: It's all good. Career; marriage; career and marriage; career or marriage; whatever.
Mona Lisa Smile seems to want to convey a time when women had limited choices, like that's changed a lot, so that contemporary women might compare and contrast, but it also wants to show really beautiful fashion from the days when men were men and women were extraneous, so it's all a little confusing. This is a representation of the '50s as interpreted from the very, very superior vantage point of 50 years later; we all know how that works.
The film is slow. The performances are stilted. Various wags refer to the film as Dead Poets Sorority. It's apt.
(This film is rated PG)