You cannot know how I adore Maggie Gyllenhaal. She’s a proper girl’s girl like Tura Satana, Zheng Peipei or Miss Piggy. I’m absolutely enraptured everytime she flickers onto the screen. I know it’s terribly foolhardy and absurd. It’s downright unempirical on the basis of two performances (even if the films involved happen to be Secretary and Donnie Darko) and the series of merely tantalising glimpses offered by Adaptation, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind and Cecil B. Demented – but I honestly haven’t felt this way about an actress since I first watched Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
I’m surely setting myself up for a brutal fall. She’ll go and break my heart by playing Ben Affleck’s psychic love interest or something equally evil. There’s already been that unfortunate appearance in the risible 40 Days and 40 Nights. Alas, rationality so rarely enters into these things. And so any film featuring my new fave demi-goddess as a hard-drinking slapper is going to work on me. Even if Julia Roberts happens to be in it too.
It’s not just the Maggie factor. In many ways, Mona Lisa Smile is out to court favour with us females. The plot sees trout-queen Julia take a teaching post at ‘elitist icebox’ Wellesley College in the early 1950s. Here she bravely battles the patriarchy (sort of) by encouraging her young charges to question the prescriptive culture around them and exposing them to Pollock, Picasso and all the other artists that Hollywood deems inspiring for such purposes. Naturally, feathers are ruffled and most of the girls – including Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst – end up sinking back into the mire of conformity and marriage anyway, but lives are enriched and so forth.
Mona Lisa Smile is being marketed as a Dead Poets’ Society for girls, and the makers have certainly studied their template with considerable devotion. And that’s a big problem. Like Mike Newell’s treatment of masculinity in Pushing Tin, the ideas are there, but they lack clarity and sufficient force. For something that sets out to celebrate feminist frolics and freethinking, this is far too predictable, too twee, too constrained – a real laced-up whalebone wedding-day corset of a film. I wanted fireworks and primitive bra-burning and Maggie Smith to enter stage left with a whip, not ‘Now let’s forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice-cream.’
Issues of militancy aside, Mona Lisa Smile is a well-performed, well-intentioned and well-groomed drama. And in case I neglected to mention earlier, it also stars Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom I’m quite fond of really.