"Playing Mona Lisa" is a quirky movie without having the small-budget look of an independent film. Made by The Bubble Factory, it's based on a play called "Two Goldsteins on Acid", although I can't imagine that title applying to this movie, so I would guess that the movie has a different focus than the play. The main character is Claire Goldstein (Alicia Witt), a 23-year old just graduated student from a music academy in San Francisco. (The film looks like it was shot in San Francisco. Lots of places that I recognized and lots more that I didn't recognize.) After Claire and her boyfriend Jeremy both miss making the semi-finals of the Tsaichovsky Competition, they drown their sorrows that night and Jeremy proposes to Claire.

Claire freezes up, she doesn't know what to do. She goes to her best friends Sabrina (Brooke Langton) and Arthur (Johnny Galecki) for advice and there she does decide to accept Jeremy's proposal. Covered up in bits of colored paper, all saying yes in various languages and phrases, Claire traipses through San Francisco to Jeremy's place, and Alicia Witt looks quite cute in a pink sweater and slacks with her red hair bouncing and all the colored pieces of paper in different shapes and different words. Anyway, devastation awaits her, as Jeremy doesn't remember last night and in fact wants to "step back" from their relationship.

For the rest of the movie, the main plot is Claire being depressed, people trying to cheer her up, and Claire's music professor Bennet (Harvey Fierstein) trying to get Claire to show up and perform for an audition for some New York symphony or whatever. Every time Claire starts to think she's getting better, like when she meets and starts dating Eddie (Ivan Sergei), she is reminded of Jeremy and goes into another deep funk. So the main plot is about Claire trying to get over Jeremy and moving on with her life.

I haven't done justice to the movie yet. There are several great characters in the movie. Sabrina who sleeps around while she waits for her true love to return in three months. Arthur the fashionably depressed and morose intellectual who doesn't want to admit he's in love with the head cheerleader of the Oakland Raiders (and who always beats him in Scrabble). Claire's mom and dad Sheila and Bernie (Marlo Thomas and Elliott Gould), Sheila is trying to revive her grandmother's Jewish recipes for the wedding, Bernie is deeply off-kilter for some unknown reason which is revealed near the end of the movie. Claire's sister (who's name is not listed in IMDB, but she's played by Molly Hagan) who is going to get married in a few months to Barry (the movie takes place over the course of three months). Bennett the gay music professor who is still pining for his great love who left him three years ago.

It's a lot of great characters who get not that much screen time but they seem fully fleshed. They have their quirks and their separate goals and you don't get the feeling that they're around just to play off of Claire. It does give the movie more of an independent film look but as I said it's well-filmed so it looks like a professional film. Oh, about the title of the film. Sabrina tells Claire that to attract a guy you have to be mysterious and unpredictable, like Mona Lisa. People look at that painting and they can't tell why the heck is Mona Lisa smiling that weird smile of hers. So Claire has to "play Mona Lisa", "*be* Mona". Which she tries to do once or twice with varying degrees of success.

The last thing to mention is that Alicia Witt is really good at the piano. She's performed at some concert hall and she played all the piano scenes in the movie and wrote one of the piano songs. That was mostly when she was younger though, as she decided to concentrate on her acting career. But it's really cool to see an actor actually perform musically (I liked Duets for the same reason).

This is a good movie. You know, it's probably more of a comedy than a drama now that I think about it. Great character performances and several minor plots that all come together in the end. Everything just fits. It's a bit more over the top in a San Francisco cliche sort of way, but that's about the only bad thing that I can think of about this movie.