Painting by Numbers Mona Lisa Smile - David Lavery

Painting by Numbers
Mona Lisa Smile
Directed by Mike Newell
Screenplay by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal
Starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dominic West,
Marcia Gay Garden, Topher Grace
MPAA Rating: PG 13
Two stars
Reviewed by David Lavery
Midway through Mona Lisa Smile, we find Wellesley College art history professor
Katherine Watson (Roberts), a new, member of the faculty this Fall of 1953, a
noncomformist (from California, of course) with suspect interest in Modern Art,
working away diligently at a paint-by-numbers Van Gogh still life. Later she will
address her class about the work of art in the age of mass production and the 50s
phenomenon that promised to make “every man a Rembrandt.” (Other Watson
lessons in the 1953-1954 school year include discussion of a Soutine carcass, firsthand
inspection of a Pollock, and a thirty-years-before-its-time Killing Us Softly slide
presentation on advertising’s mixed-messages for women). Later still, in a scene
obligatory in any movie about teachers, from Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie to Dead Poets Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus, Paint by Numbers
will play a key role as once suspicious students demonstrate love and respect for
their teacher prior to, adorned in caps and gowns, chasing after her departing car on
bicycles in a really silly scene.
Cast in the film as part of its recreation and dissection of Eisenhower-era conformity
(a process that continues on into the worth-staying-for closing credits), Paint by
Numbers instead comes to seem a traitorous embedded commentary on Smile’s
derivativeness. Directed by Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a
Funeral), this isn’t just a Beloved Teacher film: populated not only by adults like
Roberts and Marcia Gay Harden (as Roberts’ tightly-wound landlady, a Wellesley
home economics professor) but with the next generation as well--Kirsten Dunst, Julia
Stiles, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Maggie Gyllenhal--it’s a Chick Flick too and paints by
numbers from both formula’s palettes, offering us the Really Mean Prudish Girl
(Dunst), the Promiscuous Girl (Gyllenhal), the Unattractive Girl with a Heart of Gold
(Goodwin), the Really Smart Girl (Stiles), the Womanizing Professor (West)--of
Italian, of course, the Really Mean Administrator, the Shrewish Mother, the
Philandering Husband, the Lesbian Nurse (who prescribes a diaphragm for the
Promiscuous Girl) . . .
Painting by Numbers is not Mona Lisa Smile’s only art metaphor. Anxious to make
sense out of the film’s title, Leonardo’s famous La Gioconda keeps popping up
throughout, apparently intended as a comment on Katherine Watson’s own enigmatic
individualism. Smile, however, is Hollywood style feminism. Sexually liberated
women are willing to accept repression in a heartbeat. Really Mean Women become
loveable overnight. Really Smart Girls who dream of Yale Law School can become

subservient housewives at the drop of a mortar board. Again and again cake is eaten
and had too.
Still, the acting in Smile is uniformly good and the film (shot by Anastas N. Michos)
looks splendid (though hardly the equal of its far superior fellow 50s flick Far from
Heaven). For a paint by numbers exercise, it’s well done, but it’s hardly an original.
It will never be hung in an art museum.