Yes, they did have diaphragms in
the 1950s. They were still jitterbugging as late as 1954 (Bill Haley
and the Comets doing "Rock Around the Clock" was still a
year or so away). And, for a lot of women, the standard was to get
married, raise children, and look after the home -- people could
afford to do that. I
don't think a Wellesley College student would have been allowed to
openly attack a faculty member in the school newspaper without
receiving censure for being importune or just plain rude.
Which is probably why Ginnifer
Goodwin's character is the most affecting part of Mona Lisa Smile.
She plays Connie, a Wellesley student who, at a formal dance, meets
Charlie Stewart (Ebon Moss-Bacharach), a guy whom she thinks her
friends have set-up to be her date for the evening. When she finds
out that this is not so -- that the reason he's being nice and wants
to be around her is because he likes her for who she is -- you can
see how this genuinely moves her. Connie is not unattractive, but
she looks like the kind of girl who, if this type of opportunity
with this type of guy comes along, it may only happen once, and she
knows it. Goodwin steals the movie away from some considerable
competition -- three of her character's classmates and friends are
played by Julia Stiles (struggling, unsuccessfully,
not to sound overly mannered), Kirsten Dunst (projecting the
tungsten-steel beauty of a young East Coast WASP), and Maggie
Gyllenhaal (brilliant in last year's Secretary, and here
taking on a great, Suzanne Pleshette-like swagger and grace), and
they all take an Art History class from a new teacher played by
Julia Roberts.
"All of her life, she wanted to teach at Wellesley College," says the narration when Roberts' Katharine Roberts arrives from California (the story is set on the cusp of the jet age, when the West Coast still truly seemed like a foreign country to the East), and in one of the opening scenes, she leads her class through a slide presentation during which they identify all of the artwork before she has a chance to talk about them, making her feel like a rube in the process. The film gets the look and feel of the circumspect Fifties New England life (I've BEEN in houses like some of the ones in this picture) right down to the chintz used to decorate the room Katharine rents from Nancy, who, as played by Marcia Gay Harden, has a quiet, ingenuous poise and looks like she may be something of a pistol in disguise when she identifies one of the female faculty members as having had a "companion" who just passed away, without sounding disapproving. But Harden's character turns into nothing more than a couch potato meant to be as bland and complacent as the TV quiz shows she watches at home. Katharine encourages Stiles' character to follow up her pre-law studies by applying to Yale, rather than vanish into a planned marriage, and introduces her class to modern abstract art, thus causing the faculty to reconsider whether she should stay at the school or not.
Is Katharine supposed to be a "progressive thinker," and, if so, where did she get her ideas from? If she had parents who got turned on to liberalism in the 1930s -- an obvious possibility -- it's never mentioned, and a lot of the movie feels like some of the glue that would hold things together was taken out. (For instance, abstract art in the Fifties was often equated with intellectualism, intellectualism with subversiveness, and subversiveness with Communism.) Katharine isn't even given a scene, let alone a chance, to argue in her own defense before her detractors, and taking her class to see one Jackson Pollock canvas would hardly qualify, now, as being some sort of danger. Katharine is also shown dumping her perfectly well-meaning West Coast boyfriend (John Slattery) in favor of the school's Italian teacher, played by Dominic West, who turns around and tells her, "You think you came to Wellesley to help the girls find their way. I think you came to help the girls find your way." This would suggest a kind of conformity that's no improvement over the commercial-ad style of life that Katharine, and the movie, express disapproval of, but this also comes from a guy who not only admits that he hasn't been honest about himself or his past, but who is openly known among the student body for sleeping with his students.
Review by Julia Stiles · Nitrate Online
