Author: Julia Roberts

Format: AC-3

Release Date: 09-03-2004

Details: Product Description Academy Award(r)-winner Julia Roberts (Best Actress in a Leading Role, Erin Brockovich, 2000) leads an all-star cast featuring Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhall and Marcia Gay Harden. MONA LISA SMILE is a funny, inspiring and uplifting film about an art history professor with a lot to teach about life and much to learn about romance. Amazon.ca After directing films as diverse as Four Weddings and a Funeral or Donnie Brasco, Mike Newell continues his eclectic path with Mona Lisa Smile, a look at the early stirrings of feminism in 1950s America. In 1953, Katherine Watson, a young graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), accepts a position as an art history professor at Wellesley College, a conservative institution that trains young women from good families to become perfect mothers and wives. Miss Watson is convinced that she will succeed in opening new horizons for her students by encouraging them to think for themselves. Although the script for Mona Lisa Smile raised fears of a simple female carbon copy of Dead Poets Society, the result proves to be original. The young professor (a Julia Roberts who is not always on key) does not seek to galvanize the spirit of her troops (led by Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, and Maggie Gyllenhaal) by shouting catchy slogans, but rather to accompany them on the path to emancipation. Without being overly simplistic, the film makes us feel the weight of the conventions these women had to experience. While multiplying secondary stories of varying utility and failing to quite find an adequate rhythm, Mona Lisa Smile has the merit of painting a fairly accurate portrait of this generation of 1950s women who were taught docility as a primary virtue. – Helen Faradji.

UPC: 043396100756

EAN: 0043396100756

Languages: English

Binding: DVD

Item Condition: UsedVeryGood