HER-STORY LESSON FOR 'MONA LISA SMILE'S' CAST, THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE 1950S WAS A CHALLENGING SUBJECT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

`Mona Lisa Smile,'' a movie that is very much about the subject of perception, has a few perception hurdles of its own to get over.

Set at upper crust Wellesley College during the 1953-54 school year, the film charts the impact Julia Roberts' free-thinking, unorthodox new art teacher from California has on the well-groomed minds of the East Coast elite's daughters, represented by Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Sight unseen, I've been nicknaming the film ``Sylvia Plath Society'' for months.

``I've explained it as 'Dead Poets Society' meets 'The Group'; that would be my postage stamp thing,'' notes director Mike Newell, the Cambridge-educated Brit responsible for works both female- (``Enchanted April''), male- (``Donnie Brasco'') and couple-centric (``Four Weddings and a Funeral''). ``I enjoyed 'Dead Poets Society,' and of course there's no shame in remaking something that is 14, 15 years old. But, for me, it was never that. And that's because the Robin Williams character in that, brilliantly played, was a kind of witch doctor who comes along and walks on the desks and says, 'Don't believe anything.' He's an anarchist - which is a good piece of drama, and very, very, maybe, a little too simple.

``Whereas what happens with this is that it's a two-way street. This woman impinges on the girls and has a very deep effect on them. But that would also come back from the girls to her and she would be as much changed - and as much troubled by their troubles - as she was going to change them. I carried that thought around like a lantern. That had to be true, or you really hadn't done it.''

Still, much of ``Mona Lisa's'' drama centers, ``Poets''-like, around Roberts' Katherine Watson's clashes with hidebound school authorities, alumna and even her more conservative-minded students over the open-minded, liberated ideas she's disseminating at the height of Eisenhower-era conformism.

For some of the film's actresses, this represents an important lesson for young women today in how many freedoms they take for granted were utterly unthinkable a mere 50 years ago.

``I wouldn't have wanted to live at the time because it's a time when, it seemed, like one didn't have choices,'' notes Marcia Gay Harden, who based some of her portrayal of the school's unhappy etiquette and homemaking professor on her own mother, a ``perfect'' example of a 1950s Dallas housewife. ``But I think it's a super-exciting time in history. It's the cusp of the sexual revolution, which is kind of briefly mentioned in the film. But then we know that it exploded in the '60s with the pill. As soon as we had the pill, life for women changed in the Western world. We had the window of opportunity to choose something other than black or white, home or job. So it's an exciting moment, but I'd far rather look at it from now, down the path so many other women have created, than to have been the one there struggling with it.''

A different time

Others, however, wish to blunt the notion that the pre-feminist epoch depicted in the film was a terrible time for women.

``It's not so much that it was bad as it was limited,'' Roberts reckons. ``Not wrong, just smaller somehow. But certainly, traditions and a certain sense of continuity can be glorious when you apply it to life. The '50s and this particular school represented certain kinds of loyalty to tradition that should be greatly appreciated.''

It is easy, of course, to look back on the uptight attitudes of previous generations from the more enlightened vantage point of half a century later - especially when that time span has seen great leaps forward in freedom, equality and respect for many groups other than the white male protestants who have dominated America for most of its existence.

Still, Newell abhors the thought of ``Mona Lisa'' being written off as a smug, self-congratulatory exercise in liberal thinking.

``One of the big things for me in not making it that kind of woolly, generalized, beige liberalism was that you actually had to get into the specifics and see what the awkward details were,'' the director says. ``And I didn't set out to make a liberal movie. I set out to make a movie about wonderful, three-dimensional, concrete characters. I'm not even sure that I quite know what the movie is about, necessarily. But I do know the characters, and what happens out of their interactions.''

For the younger actresses, just interacting with their own characters was a source of continual revelation.

``I liked that the women at Wellesley, although they weren't necessarily going to do anything with their education after college, were really interested in learning,'' says current Columbia undergraduate Stiles, who plays Joan, the brainiest of Katherine's charges. ``And having to put on a girdle every day certainly made daily life for women back then much more relatable than anything I could have read about.''

``My character was definitely the most stuck with the facade of the '50s,'' says Dunst, whose Betty gets married before any of her on-screen classmates. ``She was clearly a product of this overbearing mother and has all this pressure on her. So she acts in a really juvenile way, with all of these outbursts. She's really aggressive and not a very nice person, but hopefully you see that she is in a lot of pain.''

``I attempted to resist paying too much attention to the constraints of that decade,'' adds ``Secretary'' star Gyllenhaal, whose Giselle in this film is one of the WASPy college's token Jewish attendees - and a young woman already liberated before her time. ``It would have been a mistake for me to make Giselle decide that she was a loose woman, and was sorry and gonna cry. I think Giselle is doing pretty well.''

Mind your manners

There was one thing the younger actresses seemed to agree on: Their own '50s poise and etiquette courses were no fun.

``The charm school was all about trying to teach the young women in the cast what the attitudes of mind were in the 1950s,'' Newell explains. ``The girls all vigorously reject the notion that that was of any use to them whatsoever. They say that the only things worthwhile they learned were that people smoked a lot and you're not supposed to cross your legs. They can say that until they are blue in the face, but they actually got a lot out of it. They may have felt foolish walking around with books on their heads, but they did it and I think you can see that they actually did learn how to be well-bred young women.''

Oh yeah?

``All of it was a terrible waste of time,'' Dunst insists. ``And the head-book thing is a bunch of crap, too!''

Which speaks to ``Mona Lisa Smile's'' most reductive notion: that 1950s Wellesley (which a decade later was turning out the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton) was primarily a bride factory for wealthy young society men.

``I talked to lots of the old girls from this university,'' Newell recalls. ``They all said it was never like that, there was never a marriage market, they were very serious about their studies and that they would take them forward into the world. I thought, well, there goes the movie. Then I asked them at what age they got married, and they all said, oh, 19, 20, 21. In other words, they had married exactly at this time. What was happening was, they were censoring themselves, I'm sure unconsciously, from the other side of that huge trench of the feminism of the '60s and the '70s.''

Now well on the other side of that, women face different issues. But the choice between career and family that ``Mona Lisa Smile'' so starkly contrasts is still relevant, albeit in greatly altered form.

Unless, perhaps, you're Hollywood's most successful actress.

``In my experience, there's a real ease to it,'' says Roberts, who by all evidence is happily married to her second husband, cameraman Daniel Moder. ``But in part, that's because I've been able to have a lot of great career opportunities and build on them over a long period of time. So the kind of attention or maintenance or focus that I give to my career, as it were, can be very sporadic and of my choosing. I'm fortunate in that way, so I can really devote myself to my family in a way that becomes very effortless and isn't a conflict and that doesn't make me feel torn.

``But I also know that I'm in a very fortunate position. I know it's not as easy for a lot of people, just by virtue of the fact that there's so much of the time and energy demand of work and of a relationship, and it can be a lot more taxing just to keep it balanced.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) `Smile' there's a new Julia Roberts film

(2) Julia Roberts, lower left, tries to open up her 1950s college students' minds in ``Mona Lisa Smile.''

(3) - Julia Roberts

(4) - Marcia Gay Harden

(5) - Julia Stiles