Friday, 9 July 2004
Mona Lisa Smile
In one of my favorite movies of all time, a character has come to accept the monotonous drudgery of his world. Traveling from one city to another, often on red-eye flights, he has compartmentalized his life to an extreme. Single-serving meals, single-serving bathroom kits, single-serving friends.
Sitting on my own flight, eating my own single-serving meal, I settled in to watch my single-serving entertainment. Much like the plane, its crew, and everything else related to a flight, in-flight movies are chosen to be safe and comforting. Regardless of any outwardly appearance of risk, every chance has been calculated to within acceptable parameters.
And so, I found myself watching Mona Lisa Smile. Jam-packed with promising, up-and-coming young stars, and led by a former promising, up-and-coming young star, the film purports to document the conflicts and upheaval at a girls prep school in postwar Wellesley College.
Of course, there isn't any real risk. Much of the movie seemed to be calculated, tailored to some audience-pleasing specifications. Not that the same couldn't be said of just about any other movie. After all, it's all about the trip, not the destination. No, the thing is that Mona Lisa Smile really doesn't make you care about the trip.
Don't get me wrong: we get some fine emoting and some juicy scenes. While I'm generally not a big fan of Julia Roberts, she puts in a decent performance. Maggie Gyllenhaal is interesting as her younger analogue, but her being "interesting" doesn't go anywhere - playing the black sheep is her role. Kirsten Dunst plays a rather two-dimensional bitch, Julia Stiles the brilliant student with potential that she just throws away. Or was it the other way around? At times they seemed interchangeable.
Actually, come to think of it, every student is brilliant and is about to throw away her future by settling for being a housewife. That's not really a stretch, since this is an exclusive girls school, and the era put a straightjacket (or petticoat) on women's role as active contributors.
Still, if that's all we're going to be show, what's the point? Roberts "makes a difference," then moves on? Okay, but I really didn't need to sit through the whole film for that. A plot synopsis could have told me the same. On the other hand, I wouldn't have gotten to see the backstabbing and yelling sessions (censored for in-flight sensitivities). But those are just as calculated as anything else; the plot moves on, the girls move on, the movie winds to an end.
Airlines calculate everything, down to how much a human life is worth. Given that it's impossible to make a flight 100% safe, how else to determine what is "safe enough"? It's hard to calculate what Roberts's "unconventional and progressive professor" is worth - obviously, it made a difference to some girls. But for those of us in the audience, we're left pretty much in the same situation as when we came into the movie.
This is a well-made, well-acted film. The scripts flows, the cinematography is worthy. But the ideas roll off like a gentle rain, rather than sinking in. Other than managing not waste two hours of our lives, this movie doesn't really make much impact.
2 / 5 - Eh, decent enough. Want to see women really making a difference? Go see Frida instead.