Mona Lisa Smile must have looked good on paper, particularly when the casting agent got through with it. In the lead (by a nose) you've got perhaps the worlds most popular actress Julia Roberts and her stable-mates are comprised of three of the best and/or popular young actresses in film - Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's a period piece set in the idyllic mid-50's set to Nat King Cole standards. A collegiate character-study with plenty of characters to study all set to be directed by someone who's proven to be adept at juggling lots of storylines at once (Four Weddings and a Funeral's) Mike Newell. How can this thing miss? Oh wait - we're going to need a script.

Enter Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal whose last two films were Planet of the Apes and Mighty Joe Young. The leap from monkey-business to blue-blood Wellesly girls must have raised an eyebrow somewhere along the line, but that's how the story goes. Mona Lisa Smiles is sort of a variation on a theme we've seen before: Roberts lands a job at the all-girl Wellesly College, a ultra-conservative institution that is more concerned with preparing young women for marriage and child-rearing than careers (Think BYU, during the Lavelle Edwards years). Roberts shows up form California with a head full of progressive ideas about the role of women in society and right away the two worlds collide.

Alot of this film could justly be described as a bitchy cat-fight - particularly when Roberts raises the hackle of Dunst who is not only a notable columnist in the School paper but the daughter of influential monied trustees. She bares her teeth in a stand-off with Roberts early on and there adversarial relationship remains a central theme in the film. For her part Julia Stiles turns in pretty much the same performance she gives in every movie, with just a notch less condescending aloofness and Maggie Gyllenhall is the loose cannon/slut of the bunch. Of the three Maggies is the best performance, but then again she's the stronger actress. As for Roberts, she seemed like she was pretty much on auto-pilot during alot of this film, in any case it wasn't a film her charm could salvage.

Roberts plays an Art Professor and the whole Mona Lisa Smile thing is sort of played as a metaphor to represent the painted-on, keeping-up-appearances happy exterior of these girls who marry into privilege only to find out that their husband immediately begin to cheat on them an the whole rosy facade has just been a sham . . . thing. And the crux of the film is that warmed-over theme of you're-teaching-them-but-they're-really-teaching-you, business. The problem with this is that you really see no character development at all until the final scene where everyone except Gyllenhal has changed completely as a result of this marvelous experience they've all shared. But the film is so disjointed and poorly executed that you lose interest in even the most basic of plot-lines and start thinking about how big Julia Roberts mouth is when she laughs and how tiny Kirsten Dunst's teeth are and how incredibly sexy Maggie Gyllenhaal is . . . where was I?

The characters are drawn so one-dimensionally that you couldn't side with any of them, Dunst's bitchy mean-spirited ways were only her protection from the pain of her disappointing marriage, Gyllenhall is the product of a broken home who acts out, Stiles has the world by the tail, yet really just wants to settle into easy suburbia. The most interesting character was Ginnifer Goodwin's but she was just the stock homely girl desperately trying to get what everyone else would get without trying.

In all fairness, there are sequences in this film that work and the dialogue works along with it - but somewhere between the script, the direction and the editing room something went haywire. The performances aren't necessarily to blame, Marcia Gay Harden turns in good work as does Gyllenhall. The reason this film fizzles out is because it just doesn't go anywhere. At some point you expect all these story strings to be pulled together in a smart little knot, but it never really happens, they just dangle and blow in the wind. Practically until the last 10 minutes, when they gather it all up in a sloppy bundle and try to foist it off as a Goodbye Mr. Chips or To Sir With Love type affair. But by this time, it's too late, it's pencils up and thumbs down.