“Trite, anachronistic, and historically illiterate. The 1950s were complex. Not every woman was a proto-feminist waiting for a savior from California. The film demonizes the girls who choose marriage and family, just as much as it claims to liberate them. Hypocrisy dressed in a twinset. 2/10.”
She scrolled further. A one-star review, username :
Then her phone rang.
Lena scrolled for two hours. She forgot her paper. She forgot the real Mona Lisa. She was reading the story of a thousand different women, all arguing about a 6.5/10 movie from 2003.
The cursor blinked on the search bar, a tiny, impatient heartbeat in the dark of the dorm room. Lena, a freshman art history major, typed: IMDb Mona Lisa Smile . Imdb Mona Lisa Smile
“The real scandal isn’t the movie. It’s what the movie leaves out. The real Wellesley in the 50s had queer students, communist sympathizers, brilliant Black women who weren’t just ‘the maid in the background.’ The film’s feminism is white, upper-class, and narrow. But you know what? My grandmother, who was a Black maid at Wellesley in 1953, loved this film. She said, ‘It was the first time I saw a white woman on screen admit she was lonely.’ Sometimes, a narrow door is still a door.”
The IMDb page loaded: Mona Lisa Smile (2003) . 6.5/10. “A free-thinking art history professor teaches conservative 1950s Wellesley girls to challenge societal norms.” “Trite, anachronistic, and historically illiterate
“I saw this in theaters in 2003. I was 41, a divorced mother of two, working as a secretary. My own mother, a Wellesley graduate of 1956, had just passed. I took her pearl necklace to the showing. When Julia Roberts’ character, Katherine Watson, says, ‘I thought I was headed to a place where I could make a difference,’ I sobbed. My mother never became a lawyer. She became a hostess. She told me the happiest day of her life was her wedding. I never believed her. But after the movie, I held her pearls and wondered: what if her smile, like the Mona Lisa’s, wasn’t a performance? What if it was real, and I just refused to see it?”