MOVIE · 2003

Mona Lisa Smile

DramaRomance117 min

Julia Roberts is Katherine Watson, a recent UCLA graduate hired to teach art history at Wellesley College in 1953. At a school where bright young women are still being steered toward marriage and decorum, her classroom begins to unsettle the future her students have been prepared for. Among them are Kirsten Dunst's Betty and Julia Stiles' Joan, classmates facing very different pressures around love, ambition, and adulthood. As Katherine pushes beyond the approved curriculum, debates about paintings and ideas turn into clashes over tradition, independence, and the roles available to women on campus and beyond.