By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Mike Newell
Starring: Julia Roberts | Julia Stiles | Kirsten Dunst | Maggie Gyllenhaal | Marcia Gay Harden
Country: united_states
Year: 2003
Running time: 119
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304415/combined
Bruce says: “Only two names are listed in the writing credits but I would swear that this film was designed by a committee. A lot of ‘stuff’ is going on here and usually the bad stuff is also the good stuff depending from which angle you happen to be looking. As a weakness, there are too many characters with too many subplots – but as a strength, almost all of them are more compelling than the central character, Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts). There just is no substance to her role. She has come to Wellesley from Berkeley to teach Art History. Why is she on the East coast in the first place? (She needed to escape.) Why Wellesley? (It has always been her dream.) What is she trying to prove? (She wants to make a difference.) As the drama unfolds there remains an underlying need to ask these questions again to get past the half-answers we got the first time around. Roberts has not created a character that is very convincing in spite of the dialogue that wants us to believe otherwise. I don’t mean to place the blame on her shoulders entirely; suffice it to say she in no way rises above the material.
“Three other actors do succeed in that endeavor. Maggie Gyllenhaal lights up the screen every moment she appears. She plays Giselle Levy the token New York Jew who happens to be the only liberated student on campus. Giselle has taken liberation to extremes, over imbibing and indiscreetly having affairs with her Italian instructor and her psychotherapist. Kirsten Dunst is wonderful as Betty Warren, the bitchy WASP daughter of a nasty matron who runs the Alumni Affairs Committee as though she had a moral imperative. Marcia Gay Harden plays Nancy Abbey, Roberts’ alcoholic landlady who ‘lost her man during the war.’ She is an etiquette instructor, passing down all the rules of how to keep your husband happy, assuming, of course, that all the girls have marriage as their primary goal and are successful in meeting that objective. These three performances are all caricatures, deliciously created.
“Another example of simultaneous good and bad is the physical environment. As is often the case with period pieces (MONA LISA SMILE takes place
over the 1953-54 school year) the sense of place is created by getting up close (to edit out any modernization in the immediate vicinity) to the buildings used for the college classes and the homes where many of the faculty and students live. This technique is effective here because Wellesley in the mid ‘50s was repressive and claustrophobic. The downside is that we never are able to step back and have a good look at the landscape of the 1950’s; we must be content to create the whole from bits and pieces of dialogue, wardrobe and items on the campus bulletin board.
“We are told that the brief time Katherine Watson spends on the Wellesley campus is sufficient to make a big difference in the lives of her students. These are unbelievably smart girls. I have a feeling they would have figured things out for themselves.” 3 cats