Mona Lisa Mystery in "The Freshman"

The Mona Lisa plays an integral, complicated role in the movie "The Freshman."

First Clark (Matthew Broderick) is amazed to find that Don Carmine Sabatini (Marlon Brando) has the original Mona Lisa painting hanging in his living room, whereas the tourists in Paris are just looking at a fake. Next Clark and the Don's daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller) dance to the song "Mona Lisa" by Nat King Cole.

This scene is funny, touching, and richly layered. The enigma of the Mona Lisa, in both the painting and song, perfectly encapsulates the mystery of Don Sabatini himself. Clark is told that Sabatini is just a local importer, but he wonders whether he's actually Don Corleone from "The Godfather" or some other extraordinarily powerful mafia don. Clark also doesn't know what to make of Tina, who wants to dance shortly after first meeting, and who tells Clark outrageous, yet somehow plausible stories about her father stealing the Mona Lisa and forcing Harvard to accept her as a transfer student. Similarly, the Mona Lisa is filled with mystery. To this day, tourists and scholars are still asking how and why Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and what her subtle smile might convey. As the song asks, "Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Or is this your way to hide a broken heart? ...Are you warm? Are you real, Mona Lisa?" 

Clark is in a state of awe, which, as social psychologists have found, entails two key elements: mystery and vastness (1). We've already seen how much mystery Don Sabatini, Mona Lisa, and Tina hold for Clark, but what about vastness? The vastness in this case is not literally physical (as in a huge night sky filled with stars), but, rather, the vastness of immense social power--both the Mona Lisa's and Don Sabatini's, and, by extension, Tina's.

Clark's look of awe when first laying eyes on Don Sabatini

 

On first seeing the Mona Lisa, Clark says, "Jesus, look at that!" If the camera had showed his face, presumably it would have looked like his initial reaction to Don Sabatini.

The Mona Lisa motif reverberates right until the end of the movie, where we hear the piano notes of "Mona Lisa" softly playing while Clark's voice summarizes how the con game successfully wraps up after the climactic Gourmet Club dinner. Then the MC of the event (Bert Parks) sings "Mona Lisa" while Clark and Tina dance on an empty dance floor, a beautiful echo of their intimate, initial dance in the living room. 

But this scene is much more than a continuation of the movie's con game because it turns out that Tina and her father have real affection for Clark. Tina now tells Clark that she'd like to spend a night in his dorm room, and Don Sabatini tells him, "You know I...I meant everything I told you, Clark," which must have included saying that Clark is like the son he never had. So the truth frame of the whole movie gets flipped upside down. It wasn't just a con, after all. It was based on real feelings.

We again hear the song asking, "Are you warm? Are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?" In other words, the whole con game with the komodo dragon could have been nothing more than a work of art: ingenious and lovely, but ultimately cold and lonely, leaving Clark on his own. This ending tells us it's more than that. The Mona Lisa is warm and real, like Carmine and Tina Sabatini.    

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(1) See Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, "Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion." Cognition and Emotion vol. 17, pp. 297-314, 2003. 

My Related Posts: 1) the Cat Poem in "The Freshman," and 2) Professor Fleeber.