Mona Lisa Smile

It is not entirely wrong to call Mona Lisa Smile a female counterpart to "Dead Poets Society", in which Robin Williams is loved by his pupils and feared by his superiors for his unorthodox methods and values. In the entertaining and moving drama Mona Lisa Smile the role belongs to Julia Roberts.

The year is 1953. The young, newly qualified art history teacher Katherine Watson is hired at the conservative and tradition-bound Wellesley College in New England, where some of the country's most gifted young women study. To challenge her students intellectually, Katherine refrains from following the curriculum. Instead she includes modern art, which deeply provokes these daughters of the upper middle class, but also sets them thinking.

Katherine is shocked to discover that all her students have only one thing on their minds: they want to get married. Even the most able, such as Betty Warren and Joan Brandwyn, are ready to give up further study in favour of a career as a housewife. Katherine tries to convince the girls that there are other options, but she is fighting an unequal battle at a time when there is a concerted effort to force women back to the kitchen after they have tasted independence during the Second World War, when many women took over traditionally male jobs.

With her progressive ideas Katherine is a thorn in the side of the school's reactionary forces, the girls' parents and some of her own students, but even though Katherine's days at Wellesley College are probably numbered, her efforts have not been in vain.

Mona Lisa Smile is a decent, traditional drama with a message that is unlikely to offend anyone. The film's strength, though, is that it does not take an entirely one-sided view of how a woman's life ought to be shaped. Katherine may well be our heroine, but the student Joan Brandwyn's reasons for giving up a promising career come across as entirely valid.