A young woman's feminist primer

Mona Lisa Smile

Rating: * * * (out of 5)
Director: Mike Newell
Running time: 119 minutes
Language: English
Currently showing

According to director Mike Newell, "Mona Lisa Smile" is not a chick flick, it's "just a movie." But you wonder if any guy out there would agree after sitting through two solid hours of feminist preaching from none other than Julia Roberts.

With a cast dominated by glamorous femmes and the dialogue centered on the issue of marriage vs. career, the temptation to call it "heavily chick-oriented" is overwhelming. The big distinction between this and other tales of female empowerment is that it's set in 1953, when feminism was still spanking new and totally freakoid. (Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" was published in the United States that very year.) Back then, feminist jargon/slogans had yet to be constructed and the movie's best moments show the women struggling over terms like "free-thinking individual" in relation to their own lives. Unequipped with the right words, Julia Roberts' character is forced to repeat the same (and rather lame) line a couple of times with a sort of desperate pleading: "Girls, you can bake your cake and eat it too!" Tell that to Simone.