Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot.  
Mona Lisa Smile is a deck stacked in Julia Roberts' favor. The movie's premise is that every girl in a certain 1950's women's college is biding her time until she's lucky enough to find a man to provide for her. In like a California breeze sweeps Berkeley graduate Katherine Watson (Roberts), to blow the cobwebs off of these young girls' unused minds.  
 
No doubt there were many repressed women in the pre-feminist era, but were so many of them gathered in one particular place? The girls at Wellesley College are Stepford Wives in training. They let men treat them brutishly (no physical abuse, mind you--the women just aren't allowed to think for themselves). Or they drink lots of booze and smoke up a storm. Or they sit around at night, practicing being spinsters (particularly Marcia Gay Harden in a really thankless role).  
 
In fact, the only role more thankless than Harden's is that of Kirsten Dunst, so charming in Spider-Man and such a prig here. As Betty Warren--the school's unhappily married, McCarthy-like reporter--the sole point of Dunst's character is to make everyone as miserable as she is. Warren really takes passive-aggressiveness to an ethereal level.  
 
But there are a lot of cracks in Katherine Watson's progressive thinking, too. First off, if she's such a smart thinker, why is Watson making time with a prof (Dominic West) who has a rep for sleeping with the students?  
 
Secondly, there's the little speech that one of the students makes to Katherine near movie's end. In effect, the student says that since Katherine wants every woman to make a choice, she's made her choice to be a housewife, and what's wrong with that? From the moviemakers' point of view, the speech is meant to be ironic, but it actually leaks the ugly little secret that radical feminists don't want to hear: Another woman's choice doesn't always agree with your own.  
 
Anyway, the movie gives its game away at about the halfway point, when the girls usher Katherine into their secret cult, just like in Dead Poets Society. How progressive can a feminist movie be when it's set in the '50s and yet steals its ideas from a lousy '80s men's movie?  
 
Mona Lisa Smile is rated PG-13 for adult language and situations.  
 
