The music of the Mona Lisa Smile

I still have to see the movie so I do not really have any idea if Mona Lisa Smile is anything earthshaking, entertaining or should be saved only for video viewing. But the latest Julia Roberts starrer has a gem of a soundtrack album. I do not know if all the tracks included made it to the movie but whether it did or not, this is one collection that anybody who loves beautiful songs will truly treasure.

Mona Lisa Smile is set in the late ‘50s. It is the story of Katherine, a teacher from UCLA in California, played by Roberts, who goes to the East to teach at the all-girl college Wellesley in New England. Her most notable students are Kirsten Dunst as the newly- married Betty, Julia Stiles as Joan, the girl torn between the Yale Law School and marriage and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Giselle who has no qualms about getting into intimate relationships. Marcia Gay Harden is cast as one of Roberts’ co-teachers while Dominic West is the attractive Italian language teacher Katherine and Giselle fall for.

The key word here or I should say, key numbers, are ‘50s. Because of the setting, it also means that the design, costumes, make-up, hairstyles and best of all, the music all come from that period or earlier. Some of the most beautiful songs ever written came out of that era. Rod Stewart agrees. So do Boz Scaggs and Cyndi Lauper and even Barbra Streisand and all those pop stars who have recently rediscovered the undiminished charm of these old songs and released albums made up of standards.

And that is what adds to the enchantment engendered by the soundtrack album of Mona Lisa Smile. It has old songs performed by some of the most popular artists of today. They all do a great job, beautifully imparting their unique pop sensibility to the immortal compositions. Can you imagine anything as blissful as the sound of British soul artist Seal singing Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa? With the way he does it, I am sure you too will agree that he makes it sound as though the song was written expressly for him.

And that’s not all. Others who contributed to the album are Tori Amos, who by the way, also appears in the movie, with You Belong to Me and Murder He Says; Bewitched by Celine Dion; Santa Baby by Macy Gray; Besame Mucho by Chris Isaak; Secret Love by Mandy Moore; What’ll I Do by Alison Krauss; I’m Beginning to See the Light by Kelly Rowland, I’ve Got the World on a String by Lisa Standsfield; Streisand with Smile. The Trevor Horn Orchestra perform two of the most popular dance tunes of the time, Istanbul (Not Constantinople) and Sh Boom (Life Could Be a Dream).

The only new song in the soundtrack is The Heart of Every Girl, written and performed by Elton John. It was one of the nominees at the American Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards where it lost to Into the West from The Return of the King by Howard Shore, Fran Walsh and Annie Lennox who also sings the song in the final movie of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Into the West is once more a frontrunner in the upcoming Academy Awards, where it was nominated as Best Original Song along with A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow by Mitch & Mickey from the Christopher Guest comedy A Mighty Wind; Scarlet Tide composed by Elvis Costello for Cold Mountain; The Triplets of Belleville by Ben Charest from the animated French feature of the same title; and You Will be My Ain True Love written by Sting also from Cold Mountain.

Incidentally both Scarlet Tide and You Will Be My Ain True Love are performed by Alison Krauss in the Cold Mountain Soundtrack. As mentioned earlier, she is also in Mona Lisa Smile where she sings the Irving Berlin ballad What’ll I Do.

From The Mail

Mr. F. Datu, Jr., wrote in from San Fernando, Pampanga: "For quite sometime now I have been on the look out for your column that might feature the movie music of The Lord of the Rings. In preparation to watching the last of the trilogy, I watched again the DVD of the first of the series, The Fellowship of the Ring. But this time around, I got more drawn to the music. A song, sweetish, melancholic, Irish/Scottish, was sung in its entirety when the movie credits started rolling at the end. I searched from the credits and found that the music score was by Howard Shore. However, the haunting song seems to have been Aniron that was composed and performed by Enya.

I hope you could tell your readers more of the LOTR music but most especially that of the first of the trilogy, of Aniron and of Enya. And if there is any hope of getting a copy of it, I shall be most obliged."

Thank you for writing in Mr. Datu. I plead guilty to missing out on the music of The Return of the King. There are so many new CDs I want to write about but reality says I cannot do them all. Sorry. I did do one or two pieces on The Fellowship of the Ring plus Enya and Aniron three years ago when the film first came out. Will see if I can do another one soon. As for a copy, the soundtracks of all three films are available locally. Check out the music stores and feast to your ears’ content.