Mona Lisa Smile review

Julia Roberts takes on the Robin Williams role in this engaging female variation on Dead Poets Society. Mona Lisa Smile is set in Wellesley, "the most conservative college in the nation" in the 1950's. The privileged students are taught invaluable rules of etiquette and propriety, like how to cross and uncross their legs, as a means to attract a suitable husband. Wellesley openly prepares its pupils not for careers but for lives of domesticity and subservience. Thrust into this staid arena, as Wellesley's new history of art teacher, is the freethinking and liberal Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts).

Written by two men, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, and directed by Mike Newell, best known for his hilarious depiction of upper class antics in Four Weddings And A Funeral, Mona Lisa Smile takes a pointed stance on the stifling morals and expectations imposed on the country's elite young women in mid-century America.

Inspiring teachers and their impact on their students is a well that has been dipped into many times before in movies like Mr Holland's Opus and Dangerous Minds, but it's the gentrified setting of Dead Poets Society that draws the obvious comparisons here. Newell has assembled a masterful cast, especially to portray the students who range from the bitterly cruel Betty (Kirsten Dunst) to the stubbornly grounded Joan (Julia Stiles) to the promiscuous Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Smart but inexperienced, Watson is initially unsettled when faced with a class full of bright and well prepared pupils, but her trepidation proves unfounded when she discovers that away from the security of the syllabus, the girls are less assured. Along with expanding their minds, she encourages them not accept the defined roles that have been mapped out for them. Her "subversive" teaching methods cause her problems with the faculty, but endear her to her students who come to embrace her as a liberating and inspiring figure.

Inevitably in a film involving Roberts, there's a romantic element. As Watson adapts to her new life, she is torn between an old flame (John Slattery), the Wellesley womaniser Dunbar (Dominic West) and her fierce independence. Roberts does a wonderful job of capturing the vivacity and integrity of Watson succeeding, as she did in Erin Brockovich, in being able to transcend her looks and add substance to that smile.

Unlike the film's namesake, there is nothing enigmatic about Mona Lisa Smile. Many of its characters lack subtlety, particularly the unctuous Dunbar, and the story travels down an all to predictable path, but it does offer some fine performances and an evocative glimpse into an unfamiliar world.