LAST SATURDAY I saw a movie so inept, so stupid, so generally and particularly wrong that I felt justified in not having paid much attention to movies over the past decade or so, but it also gave the peculiar kind of pleasure that only a genuinely bad movie can sometimes give. The movie is called Mona Lisa Smile, and is about Wellesley College in the early 1950s, and stars Julia Roberts. Dorothy Parker is supposed to have said of Katharine Hepburn–wrongly, it turns out–that, as an actress, “she ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B.” Roberts takes things all the way to C. She does Happy, Angry, and Sad, but nothing beyond or between. Mona Lisa Smile, in its unsubtlety, is perfect for her.
For a bad movie to give pleasure it must be dead-on wrong in an impressive way. The Best of Everything (1959), which was about three beautiful young women who come to New York to work in publishing, was such a movie. A detail I recall, nearly 45 years later, is Hope Lange, a lowly secretary at a publishing firm, reading unsolicited manuscripts, putting a piece of paper in her manual typewriter and tapping out, “This novel shows careful delineation of character.” Bang, next thing you know she has become senior editor, a job she has taken away from the menacing Joan Crawford.
Mona Lisa Smile is about the pressures of conformity at Wellesley in the 1950s. I found this premise highly amusing, since some of the most impressively nonconformist women I know went to Wellesley during those years: the classicist Mary Lefkowitz, the writer Diane Ravitch, the columnist Judith Martin (also known as “Miss Manners”). Well-made art makes the unpredictable seem plausible. In this flick everything is predictable and implausible. It also has the added charm of ahistoricism, such as using “rip-off” more than a decade before its time and referring to an academic department chairman (in 1953) as “chair.” Discovering historical faux pas in movies is a fine indoor sport. “Hey, Caesar, check it out.”
I watched Mona Lisa Smile on DVD. I watch most movies on VCR or DVD these days, even though a 14-theater cineplex is three blocks from my apartment. I feel no urgency about seeing any movie, and make it a special point to neglect the big movies that are being most talked about at the moment. I waited three years before seeing Schindler’s List; I plan never to see Titanic; and a horde of wild Jews, prodded on by Roman soldiers, couldn’t drag me to The Passion of the Christ.
I retain a mild addiction to movie-watching, one getting milder all the time. At chez Epstein we try to find a watchable flick every Saturday night, which we view with popcorn, Granny Smith apples, and a beer. I say “watchable” as opposed, say, to great or to nauseating. My expectations have been greatly lowered. I don’t hold out much hope for movies, though I am still pleased, as happens every so often, to be surprised at an artful flick.
When I am surprised, it is by small movies. I recently saw a swell Canadian movie called Owning Mahowny, about a midlevel bank manager with a high-level gambling problem. It didn’t change my life, you understand, but neither did I feel I had been taken when it was over. I find myself watching more and more foreign films, including lots of Chinese ones, and older French movies that I missed the first time around. I’ve even come to like subtitles, which help concentrate the wandering mind.
The bigger the budget, bank on it, the worse the movie. The more talked-about the movie, the more disappointing it turns out to be. In the late ’60s and through the 1970s, when Pauline Kael was the colossus astride the New Yorker, movies became topic number one. Wherever you went, people wanted to know if you saw this or that movie, or read this or the other critic on it. Not to have an opinion on the latest flick felt like leaving home without some necessary piece of clothing.
I suspect it’s better that movies are no longer at the center of conversation or of the culture. (Not that I know what has replaced them.) Movies are merely movies, and no great fuss ought to be made over them. The people who make movies are generally not even close to intelligent. When movies are really excellent, such as Casablanca, they are so almost by accident.
When my granddaughter was four years old, she sat on my lap and we watched The Fox and the Hound. During a scene in which the fox is being gently ejected from the home of an old woman who had cared for him when he was injured, I exclaimed, too insistently perhaps, about the sadness of what we were watching. “Grandpa,” my granddaughter said, without turning her head, “it’s only a movie.” The kid got it dead-on right.
–Joseph Epstein
