That woman, Catherine Watson, is trying to lead a new ambition. Kathryn graduated recently from the University of California, then hired to teach the history of real art at Wellesley's prestigious Women's College in 1953. Catherine is determined to confront the old and seemingly uninspiring traditions of the community, attracting her traditional students including Betty and A new and exciting challenge to the spread of meaningful art.
In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, Mona Lisa Smile is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike.
Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.
Common Sense Media
December 26, 2010
Glossy entertainment value but far from art.
Rolling Stone
December 23, 2003
Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.
Tyler Morning Telegraph (Texas)
September 20, 2004
...would have been better served by characters with a little less formula than the paint-by-numbers projects so loved by these women of Wellesley College.
USA Today
December 19, 2003
Rather than being a fascinating exploration of a much more constrained time in our social history, the film simply feels anachronistic.
Period dress, set design, manners and acting are fine--as is Mike Newell's direction. If only the script was less predictable.
Washington Post
December 19, 2003
Anyone who's ever been moved by a teacher to dream a slightly bigger dream than his parents thought he or she was capable of achieving ought to love the film, for it gets at a truer model of teacher's inspiration.
Washington Post
December 19, 2003
Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
Low IQ Canadian
May 14, 2004
Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.
Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal furnish well-observed performances that frequently outshine Julia Roberts's reflex characterization in this female variant of "Dead Poets Society."
Roberts asks her students rhetorical questions: What makes art good or bad? Who decides? But the movie answers them as canonically as the syllabus Roberts abandons.