Mona Lisa Smile

Caris treated me to a movie today. Everyone else seemed to have their own thing going; Charlie had some phone business to take care of, Bryson had his friend Max over, Averie was planning on meeting with Vanessa, so that left Caris and myself with time on our hands. We'd already spent the weekend pretty much doing nothing but reading. I got an amazing book (Skinny Women Are Evil by Mo'Nique) for Christmas; also from Caris, and it was very nice to spend hours in my jammies, curled up in my favorite chair reading. But I was ready to get out of the house today. So after a nice brunch at the pub with Charlie, I got home and asked Caris if she'd like to go to a movie, and she said yes.....and even used her free tickets to pay for both of us! A very nice treat.

We agreed to see Mona Lisa Smile with Julia Roberts. I'm sure everyone knows the premise of the movie; a young, progressive, liberal-minded woman from California takes a job at the all female Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The movie is set in 1953, and I've always loved "period pieces" so it looked like something special. I'm not going to bore you with the details, OR my opinion of the movie, as I'm sure that many have either already seen the movie or will attend soon. I would, however, like to relay my confusion over a line of dialogue in the movie that the audience reacted to in what seems to me, a peculiar way.

At one point in the movie, Julia Roberts character is surprised by her boyfriend, who unexpectedly shows up from California to visit her for the Christmas holiday. Later on in the evening, as they are enjoying drinks in a bar, he "pops" the question and gives her an engagement ring, which she is also quite surprised by. At this moment, one of her students walks up to the table to say hello and she happens to be in the company of a male teacher at the school. Julia's "fiance" introduces himself, tells the student and the teacher that he's just proposed, and the teacher then says to him, "Well, congratulations Old Man!" The audience laughs. I mean, they really laugh.

Now, granted the actor that portrays Julia's boyfriend, does seem to be a bit older (though not really THAT much). And granted, this is a movie that takes place in 1953-54, so the majority of the audience (females in the age demographic of say, 18 to 34 year olds) is really too young to appreciate the slang terms of the time. Even I wasn't born in the 50's, BUT I found it interesting that that particular line brought such a response. And honestly, it wasn't an appropriate response. There really shouldn't have been ANY response at all to that line. In the 50's, the term "old man" was used pretty often when one guy was talking to another. It's kind of like the word "dude" is used today. It wasn't a literal reference to the character's age. It was merely a familiar colloquialism of that time period, especially amongst the "upper class". It could have easily been delivered by one teenager to another without so much as a second thought. Yet, today, when the line came up in the movie and this audience laughed, I thought to myself how sad that they don't understand. They laughed, because they literally thought that one male character was actually calling the other character an old man.

It made me wonder about so many things. This is not so distant a place in our past, and yet there is so much about it that the generation of today honestly doesn't understand. Luckily, our household is musically and artistically eclectic, and so the kids have been exposed to eras of movies, television, and music that many of their peer groups may not be. I think they have an advantage that way. And maybe because of that advantage, they embrace a more innocent and nostalgic age rather than ignoring it, or pretending that it never happened. I wondered earlier today, after the movie, why this particular thing stood out to me so much. Did I pay more attention to cultural details? Did I listen in earnest when my dad talked about the Vietnam war or when my grandpa talked about World War II or the Korean conflict? Did I take particular mental notes when my mom put certain records on the record player? Did I read more than your average "Baby Boomer"? I don't know what the answer to that is. I only know that I was grateful that I knew that when that simple little line came up in the movie and I didn't laugh, I was right not to. I didn't feel old because I knew. I just felt grateful.