I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I rented and watched “Mona Lisa Smile,” the Julia Roberts vehicle about a forward-thinking art history teacher from Berkeley who comes to teach at Wellesley, a very conservative and tradition-bound institution in 1953, we are told. I knew when I put it on my Netflix list that it had gotten mediocre reviews (a miserable 34% fresh on the Tomatometer) and that it would most likely be as predictable as these things get. I could pretty much guess the plot before even pushing “play”—Unconventional Teacher arrives to inspire young minds, students resist, then they get inspired in their own unique way, which shakes things up, then word gets out to the authorities, and Teacher is reprimanded, given an ultimatum or fired out right, Teacher leaves with dignity intact, righteous and beloved by the students who’ve been changed forever. Yes, the plot was formulaic, but I actually enjoyed watching the ensemble cast of twenty-something Hollywood actresses play their various types with such earnest glee. Just so you don’t lose all respect for me, Manohla Dargis, writing for The L.A. Times at the time, and Stephen Holden of The New York Times agree with me on this. Incidentally, there’s an early scene in the movie when Julia Roberts chucks the syllabus (because the students have all memorized the slides and textbook entries in order to rattle the new teacher), and puts up a slide of Chaim Soutine’s painting of a beef carcass—clearly meant to return the favor, and shake the students out of their prissy complacency. Watching the movie while immersed in the de Kooning biography gave the scene a memorable resonance; and then watching “Vera Drake” shortly thereafter made for an interesting triptych of very different lenses onto the 1950s. So, okay, these external connections aside, the movie is “Dead Poets Society” with chicks, but what can I say, I’m a sucker for the inspirational teacher genre (I know, how transparent can I get?). Though I rarely seek out this kind of movie, when I come across one, I get hooked pretty easily. That’s how I caught “Lean on Me,” starring Morgan Freeman, while channel surfing one day, and I think I watched “Stand and Deliver” and “Dangerous Minds” on TV, too. These movies have the extra appeal of being based (however loosely) on the experiences of real teachers. It turns out that all these teachers and their students had the exact same experience! Filmmakers never seem to tire of bringing to the screen true stories from the educational trenches, and in the process, adapting the messy real life facts into the tidy conventions of a well-worn plot. And clearly, audiences, including me, never tire of watching them. Of course, what can be exciting is when a genre picture rises above its conventional trappings in some way, playing with expectations or transposing the story into surprising contexts. Then the inspirational teacher story inspires in a different way. The original “The Bad News Bears” (the inspirational coach movie being a popular sub-genre) might be an early example; “School of Rock,” a more recent one. (Coincidentally--or is it?—Richard Linklater also directed the remake of “The Bad News Bears”). But even when the movie is utterly predictable, I can derive a certain satisfaction from it, maybe akin to the satisfaction of kids who like to hear their favorite bedtime stories every night. The genre picture, then, is like an old sweater—I know where the holes are, and the loose threads hanging conspicuously threaten to unravel the whole thing, but it can still provide a familiar warmth. For a creature of habit, that’s hard to resist.

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