Mona Lisa Smile

Mike Newell’s film sets its story at a real school, Wellesley College, and the school did not stay quiet. Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal researched in the college archive and placed events in an invented 1953-1954 academic year. The college allowed limited filming on campus; most interiors were shot at Columbia and Yale, the town scenes at Tarrytown in New York state. About 200 Wellesley students worked as extras and 25 more as production assistants. After the release, president Diana Chapman Walsh wrote to alumnae on 9 January 2004, calling it a distorted and demeaning portrait of their own college and saying the finished film went much further than the screenplay they had read in making the college look rigid and hidebound and the students rich and spoiled. She added that applications were running higher than usual. The college also noted that modern art did not reach it from outside as the film has it: Wellesley began teaching the subject in the late 1920s, in a course by Alfred Barr, later the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. A good fit if you count an institution’s reply to its own fictional portrait as part of the work. Not for anyone wanting a documentary accurate women’s college of the fifties; the college itself calls the portrait skewed.