Movies Made Here: Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Child's Play was a Movie Made Here that turned what had been a girl's school in real life into a creepy school for boys and only boys. Narry a girl was present in that film, save for a brief glimpse of a nurse. And the boys were not interested at all in girls, only in terrorizing each other. 

Step into the picture perfect world Mona Lisa Smile's setting of Wellesley College and you have quite a different world. Here's a girls' school 100% fixated on men. This is the early 1950s after all and despite being the top school in the country for smart women, female intelligence was something of a ruse to win a husband. These girls were here only to bide their time before marriage. 

Into this one-step-forwards, two-steps-back landscape comes the true California bohemian Katherine, played by always-sweet Julia Roberts, who truly wants to make a difference teaching art history. These precocious (that is, snotty) girls test her, make her cry, fall in love with her, and make her cry some more. Teacher learns that she can only go so far convincing them their path is skewed. Maybe they do want to be housewives and that's okay (save for Maggie Gyllenhaal's character who is appropriately bad-ass).

Katherine however does not want to be a housewife, or even a wife for that matter, and our own is the home of three night-on-the-town scenes that play out the course of her love life (as bars often do).

First, she is there getting a drink with the male teacher that seems to both repel and attract her (trouble; we know where this is heading). Then her own gray-haired boyfriend comes along (Roger Sterling if you watch "Mad Men" – perhaps he finds a career in advertising/womanizing after she rejects his proposal). Then, she's here again with that teacher Bill (Dominic West) who becomes her lover until she realizes he's a liar. 

Yet everyone, you realize, in this world is, necessarily, a liar, as keeping up a good facade is part of the gender package. Like that cryptic "Mona Lisa" painting, still waters run deep and surface only hints at the discomfort running underneath...and big societal changes to come.