In Praise of Perfectly Fine Movies

I had a nice time watching Mona Lisa Smile!

There are some movies that are obviously bad—poorly made, poorly cast, poorly written. And then there are the movies that are great, the ones that linger in your mind for days after seeing them, scenes replaying and dialogue repeating itself. But what about the movies that exist somewhere in the middle? The movies that are…also there?

You know what I’m talking about. They’re “Sunday afternoon on TBS” movies. They’re perfectly fine movies, and there aren’t a ton of them these days. I don’t have to remind you of this fact because it’s beaten into the ground in film and culture writing, but there are so many big budget, action filled, special effects laden movies now, and fewer of the mid-budget films of my youth. This feels bad for many reasons, but what I’m here to talk about today is the film Mona Lisa Smile.  It’s a dang travesty that in the year 2023 we’re not getting films about Julia Roberts as a bold art teacher at a women’s college in the 1950s.

I somehow missed Mona Lisa Smile when it came out in 2003, even though I was in high school and this would’ve been prime sleepover material. We could’ve gotten so mad about gender norms for rich white women in the 1950s at a possibly quite inaccurately depicted women’s college! But instead, I watched it on the treadmill in 2023 and I loved every weird, pleasant, perfectly fine second.

Julia Roberts stars as an art professor who shows up ready to take on the Wellesley campus with her progressive ideas about modern art. She quickly finds out, though, that these rich bitches have their art history textbooks memorized, because they’re all extremely smart. But what they don’t know is how to think critically about art, how to form their own opinions, how to understand what makes art….well, art. But Wellesley isn’t ready for Julia Roberts, what with her bohemian lifestyle and “take it or leave it” attitude on marriage.

The students themselves are a real “who’s who” of young actresses in the early 2000s. Kirsten Dunst is about to get married and her main hobby is writing editorials complaining about staff members who give out birth control. Julia Stiles is an overachiever who’s dating the Topher Grace. Ginnifer Goodwin has a round face and unflattering bangs and so we’re all supposed to believe she’s unattractive (more on that later). Maggie Gyllenhaal is the skanky one who sleeps with old men. You know, the four friends you meet in college. The one who hates birth control, the one who dates Topher Grace, the one with bad bangs, and the skanky one (I’m trying to reclaim the word skanky—no one uses it anymore and that’s a shame).

These young woman are all incredibly smart, and they’re also mostly unaware that they’re incredibly constrained by the patriarchy. And who can blame them? Etsy didn’t exist back then, so they didn’t have anywhere they could buy coffee mugs that said “Pizza rolls, not gender roles.” Instead, those gender roles are enforced by literally everyone around them. Their mothers, their boyfriends, their college, and Marcia Gay Harden, who is truly so good and so funny as the teacher of their etiquette class.

The woman loves two things: planning a dinner party and I Love Lucy.

Julia Roberts provides the first opportunity for these girls to understand that there might be more to life than getting married and planning dinner parties for their husband’s boss. She encourages Julia Stiles to apply to law school at Yale, telling her that she can still be a lawyer even if she gets married (some women really can have it all—a law career and Topher Grace). And then she…well, that’s kind of it, I guess. She shows them some art. Kirsten Dunst gets mad a lot. But I’d argue that the movie’s appeal is the relatively slow pace, the fact that not a lot happens. I loved being inside Marcia Gay Harden’s impeccably styled, completely man-repelling house. I loved the outfits, even if they weren’t always accurate (I care more about vibes than sartorial accuracy, sorry). And I loved hearing the Mid Atlantic accents. Could. Not. Get. Enough. Kirsten Dunst and especially Julia Stiles are doing Katherine Hepburn impressions and I was thrilled just hearing them speak.

I don’t mean to say there isn’t drama. Kirsten Dunst is getting cheated on by that terrible husband she insisted on marrying. Maggie Gyllenhaal keeps getting drunk and upset (you hate to see it). And Ginnifer Goodwin…okay, it’s time, let’s talk about it. What was going on in the 2000’s and why was Hollywood hellbent on convincing us that Ginnifer Goodwin wasn’t attractive? She’s a very beautiful woman, but like half of her roles cast her as the less-pretty friend (Something Borrowed), unlucky in love (He’s Just Not That Into You), and perpetually dateless (this film). I don’t really know what’s going on with her career lately, but back then she had a terrible case of Janeane Garofalo Syndrome: movies were consistently telling us she was unattractive simply because she was brunette and had a round face and was relatively short. This is untrue! Poor Ginnifer Goodwin is constantly getting trashed by bitchy Kirsten Dunst in Mona Lisa Smile, and when she finally does get a boyfriend she becomes convinced that he already has a girlfriend. Give me a break. Let Ginnifer Goodwin be hot!

She didn’t even get to be in this random photo I found on Pinterest. She was one of the main girls!!!

Anyway. Things end up relatively okay for the four main girls. Ginnifer Goodwin gets that boyfriend back. Kirsten Dunst divorces that terrible man (!) and moves to NYC to live with Maggie Gyllenhaal, presumably as roommates but you know what, there are a lot of lesbian undertones in this movie. Julia Stiles decides to marry Topher Grace and not go to law school and she gives Julia Roberts a little speech about how she needs to respect what they want and that you can be smart and still be a housewife and sure, but…didn’t she seem so excited about law school?

Oh well, I guess?

Kirsten Dunst’s character has the biggest turnaround, going from being a marriage-obsessed, birth-control-hating, norm-upholding Stepford wife to being a divorcee who lives with Maggie Gyllenhaal. She also gave me my one cry of this film: at the end, as Julia Roberts drives away from campus (oh yeah, she leaves after one year because they want to rein in her bohemian teaching style and if we’ve learned one thing about Julia Roberts, it’s that she can’t be tamed), all the students ride their bikes after the car. Kirsten Dunst rides right by the window, openly sobbing, trying to reach for Julia Roberts’s hand (dangerous, I must say), and I shed a little tear. She grew, she changed, she graduated.

Obviously, I loved this movie. Was it perfect? No. But was it pleasant? Yes! We went through a journey together, me and Kirsten Dunst, but everything turned out pretty much okay. Julia Roberts had an entire romantic entanglement with an Italian professor that I didn’t even mention because it was so chill and uneventful. I loved it. A perfectly pleasant film. Mona Lisa Smile is currently streaming on HBOMax.

Up next week: it should be my monthly paid roundup, but I’m switching things up a little bit and doing that post the first week of May. Next week is going to be all about exercise videos, my early (fraught) relationship with them, and the absolute joy and acceptance they bring me now. See you then.