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Ciara Brown Mrs. Jobe Film Analysis April 27, 2015 Film Analysis over Mona Lisa Smile
The movie that I watched was Mona Lisa Smile.This movie is about a teacher named Katherine Watson, who gets a teaching position at Wellesley College. She becomes the Art History teacher and is pleasantly surprised by the girls on the first day of class. SHe realizes that these women are far more intelligent than they are given credit for. She spends the school year trying to change the traditional educational values, and she creates personal relationships with the girls. She tries to show them that it isn’t all about getting married to a boy as soon as they can. Katherine is a very advanced woman for her time. This movie takes place during the 1950s, which was the decade for conformity and the AMerican dream. Women were expected to uphold the standard of the “perfect wife”. The women at this college were also judged based on the men they married. Katherine worked hard to change the status quo at this school, but she was met with opposition. Not only from the other teachers at the school, but also the students.
In Mona Lisa Smile, education is not as important for the women who are attending this school. Their main goal is to marry the perfect guy, and be the perfect wife for him. They often put education on the back burner to fulfill this goal. For example, one woman got accepted into Yale Law School, but she didn’t attend because her new husband was going to school somewhere else. She had worked so hard. and this was what she truly wanted, but she gave it all up for a man. This also happened with Betty. She gave up everything for her husband, and he ended up
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cheating on her. These women grow up in a society that marriage is the most important thing. They grow up under the belief that their self-worth is determined by the type of guy they marry. Katherine sees this when she comes to Wellesley, and she is determined to change this idea. All of the girls are very against Katherine, because she wants to change this precedent.
For these girls, education is not as important as it is now. For them, it is just something to do until they get married. It is the last thing on their minds, and it is not what they want to do with their lives. In the movie, you can see that the girls are intelligent. They have the potential, and they want to learn. This is apparent on the first day of the Art History class taught by Katherine Watson, that they do care about education. They have all red the assigned reading and are able to answer all the questions posed by Ms. Watson. She sees this and understands that she would have to teach these girls in a different way. So, she begins to teach them not by the curriculum anymore. This angers the head of the college and some of the other teachers. The faculty and even the girls, feel that it is not her place to try to change what these girls learn, and what they’ve been conditioned to think of as a priority.
As Americans who value education, it should be important to us. Even more so for women, because we fought so hard and for so long to be able to get an education like the male population. This has been a very hard struggle that so many women had to go through. Now, we do have the opportunity to get an education, and just about every woman is well-educated with a college education. These women did not think of education in the same way. On one hand, they wanted to learn and become educated, but on the other hand, they were told that it wasn’t important. Throughout the movie, you witness the young girls talking about marriage and their boyfriends and so on, but you hardly hear them talking about education until later in the film.
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When Katherine begins to get through to these women, they start to realize the importance of education in their lives. However, just because they realize the importance, it does not mean that everyone else does too. The faculty still believes that their sole purpose is to get married and start families. The older women in the girls’ lives have this same mentality.
Katherine is the only person with enough sense and compassion to care about these girls. She is the only one who even bothers trying to help them see what is wrong with the education system. Ms. Watson is trying to organize a reform, but it is knocked down from every angle. No one thinks that she has the right to interfere, but she is only trying to help. She knows the value of education, and that is why she tries to help Joan get into Yale Law. When Joan does get in, she tries to convince her to go. She even talks to Joan’s husband, but Joan is insisting on staying with her husband, and not attending Yale.
This movie could be related to “Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke College” by Anna Quindlen. Quindlen speaks about how students are under pressure, and they are carrying bags of perfection. She then urges the students to put the backpacks down, and she talks about the benefits of getting rid of the backpacks. The backpacks that the girls in Mona Lisa Smile are the responsibilities of becoming the perfect housewife. This causes these women to become stressed, and not focus as much on education. These responsibilities are causing pressure on the women just as trying to be perfect would.
In conclusion, Katherine wanted to change the traditional education values. She knew that these girls had so much more potential, and that they should care about their education more. She tried as hard as she could to get through to them, and help them become the best that they
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could be. This caused her to lose her job, but in the end, she did help a few of the girls, and that was enough for her.
