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Mona Lisa Smile
It was a big weeekend for yours truly. Friday night, I attended the Oasis concert at the Molson Centre and it was awesome! On Saturday, I got myself a brand-spanking new computer. I have been writing this column on a 120mhz machine for almost four years now. Finally my salvation has arrived. My new baby is fast and furious. (701mhz, 320 Mb of Ram, cable modem, CD-Burner, Windows XP, Prophet 2 video card...) It's like day and night. I bought myself The Sims too and let me tell you, that game is addictive. I also saw Blue Crush and I want my money back. Please wait for the $2 theatre. Kate Bosworth is extremely talented but she cannot save that flick. Can Michelle Rodriguez play anything else beside her stereotypical angry Latina gimmick? The Montreal Film Festival begins on Thursday. For the first time this century, I will not have press credentials. Why? It's not worth it. We'll only have City By The Sea, Igby Goes Down and Blue Car premiering here. Two of those will come out wide within 3 weeks. There's only one movie that I truly want to see, Tom Twyker's Heaven. I'll do my best to catch it this weekend. Expect a review. In this issue, my buddy Hollyfeld reviews the script to Julia Roberts' upcoming film, Mona Lisa's Smile. I too have read it and I thought it was splendid. It's one to look out for next summer.
Mona Lisa's Smile script review
"Mona Lisa's Smile, by Larry Konner & Mark Rosenthal (revised October, 18, 2001), is perhaps the only script/movie in history to acknowledge and note the stupidity of one of the most annoying clichés in movie history. It's that scene from Predator 2, Contact, and so many other films in which the main character is introduced to someone behind a desk who proceeds to rattle off sentence fragments about the character's personal history: where they went to college, how many family members they have, what they've been convicted of. It's that annoying moment where you realize that the writers have one of two problems: either the lack of ingenuity to come up with a new means of establishing back story, or self-esteem so low that they feel the need to prove to the audience up front that, yes, they actually thought up that Danny Glover's character has a Type A personality.
And so it is that on page 30 of Mona Lisa's Smile, another of these scenes begins in earnest, when Joan Brandwyn, a student at Wellesley College, enters the office of Katherine Ann Willis (to be played by Julia Roberts), and has to listen to the following:
KATHERINE
There you are Joan Brandwyn. Okay. Pre-Law, Dean's list every year, impressive... Debate team, Co-Captain of the Field Hockey team.
Meanwhile, in the living room where I read the script for Mona Lisa's Smile, I'm thinking, "Hey, where's the gun? I could really use a gun right now. Yup, nothing like a gun to blow my fucking brains out."
But then the next three sentences follow:
KATHERINE
Why am I doing this? You're right here. What else?
Damn right. That person you're rambling on about IS right in front of you. And it's indicative of the overall quality and intelligence of this script that writers Konner & Rosenthal realized this and chose to have the characters talk to each other instead.
The concept behind Mona Lisa's Smile is a simple one, and if it sounds a lot like Dead Poets Society, that's because it is. Julia Roberts (in the Robin Williams role) moves to New England to be an art teacher for an all girls college in 1953, and through her independent spirit and teaching methods various young ingénues (Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard in DPS, Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles here) are enlightened and come of age. The twist is the pervasive sense of female empowerment throughout the story, which, unlike the popular "women in danger" movies of recent years, manages to promote a positive female identity through intelligent discourse (and sexuality, the struggle for equal opportunities, etc.), instead of by simply kicking male ass.
Tradition states that repressed female figures in movies about female empowerment are those women who simply don't know any better - yeah, Mom never went to college, and married quickly to guarantee that she wouldn't have to. But the characters in Mona Lisa's Smile are smart enough to transfer to Harvard Law School with little difficulty, even though the school only offers five slots to any women at all. The struggle for educators like Roberts character is that they seem to want to be repressed, because the road to the top seems inescapably, and downright factually, very, steep.
But is becoming a housewife really the easy way out, or are free-thinkers like Roberts' character really the scared ones? Just as her students try to balance the roles they are supposed to play alongside those they want to, Katherine has to ask herself just how often she practices what she preaches. If she's such an independent spirit, why is she stuck teaching art in an all-girls college in the frozen tundra of New England, instead of living the bohemian ideal in the warm climes of Europe? Her job seems perpetually on the brink of termination - but should she stay at Wellesley at all?
And did she fuck William Holden?
The complexity of Roberts' character is perhaps the biggest joy of the script, since the biggest flaw of films like Dead Poets Society is usually the lack of dimension given to the teachers themselves. Often, they seem to exist only to exhibit quirks of behavior that irk the faculty and intrigue the students, but say nothing about the person behind them. Think back on Robin Williams' character in that "other" teacher movie... what did we really know about him? He was funny, he was intelligent, he used to attend the school in question, but who was he? Why did he teach English? Was he a failed writer, an underachiever, or someone who wanted to teach? He lived at the school for a year - who did he know, how did he relate to the students and teachers? Did he date? Was he gay?
The answers to all of these questions, however, are answered in Mona Lisa's Smile (if, of course, you replace the mentions of "English" with "art"). Katherine is not a cipher, but rather a charming, disarming and conflicted human being who would be a treat for any serious actress to portray. And she is just one of half a dozen well-written roles for women in the script, in a Hollywood where it's hard to find one such role in any given month of films.
It's hard to elaborate on a script such as Mona Lisa's Smile, since as mentioned before, it treads territory with which we are all familiar. It has been done before, and it will be done again. What remains to be seen is whether it has ever been written this well before (not likely), and whether the final product will live up to the screenplay's promise."
(Review submitted by Hollyfeld.)
Stay tuned...
That's all folks...
Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)
Questions, comments, praise etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org
Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. He also writes a monthly column in Screenwriters Monthly entitled 'The Last Word.' Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.
