"Mona Lisa Smile"

But Goodwin, as the boyfriendless, cello-playing misfit, is a delight to watch. She's so saucy and innocently sexy that you have no doubt she'll eventually win at love. (It's a measure of the movie's blindness that, with her alluringly rounded shape, Connie is treated as the "fat" girl, even though her figure was the body type that '50s men -- not to mention plenty of contemporary ones -- would be most likely to fall for.) And Maggie Gyllenhaal, as Giselle Levy -- the "fast" girl, and also the only one who happens to be Jewish -- is smashing. The movie feels truest, shoddy ideas and all, whenever she's on-screen.

In the midst of all Giselle's youthful mistakes (she's the girl who drinks too much and sleeps with her teachers), she's the most forceful character of the bunch, the one who trusts her inner compass. The movie makes the mistake of suggesting that she's headed for self-destruction simply because she likes sex, which is a hell of a message for a supposedly feminist movie. Even so, Gyllenhaal, with a mix of vulnerability and sensual confidence, is one of the few actresses here who succeed in playing a person and not a stereotype.

Which is not to say that the movie's stereotypes, particularly when they're played by Julia Roberts, aren't enjoyable to watch. I used to be almost consistently annoyed by Roberts; now, much of the time, I find myself caught in her snare. Her giant moon-crescent of a smile is like the corny coda at the end of "Take the A Train" -- you know it's going to show up sooner or later, it's familiar to the point of goofiness, but you have an affinity for it just the same. As Katherine, Roberts gets to do a bunch of things that make sense for her character and for the times (like wearing great modernist jewelry and introducing her conventional young kits to crazy artists like Jackson Pollock) and many, many things that don't. When she's looking for lodging at the beginning of the movie, she rejects one room because male visitors aren't allowed and goes off to find another; but when her West Coast boyfriend, played by the eminently likable John Slattery, shows up to visit her, she insists that men aren't allowed at this one, either.

"Mona Lisa Smile" throws in lots of curveballs like that, without ever really making sense of them. For example, Katherine needs to learn the lesson that, much as she wants the young women of Wellesley to be open to the types of freedom she enjoys, they're not all cut out for it. The movie wants to make sure we understand that being a stay-at-home mom and homemaker is a valid choice -- the problem is, it's exactly the wrong choice for the character who ends up making it. If "Mona Lisa Smile" is going to be so conventional that its characters must "learn lessons," the lessons should at least make sense.

The movie wants to have its bread buttered on both sides, and on the crustless edges too. And yet -- there's Roberts, standing in front of a class of perfectly coiffed ladies-in-training in her hand-knit cardigans and flat shoes (outfits in which she looks unaccountably glamorous), showing them slides of raw-meat paintings by Soutine. In an earlier scene, she's tried to show them some nice, basic cave drawings, only to learn that they already know about all that stuff -- they're such eager beavers that they've gone ahead and read everything on the syllabus ahead of time. She's dismayed and dispirited, but she comes back fighting, and the scene is gratifying. She shows the young women a photographic portrait of her mother and asks, "Is it art?" When they assure her it isn't, she comes back at them: "What if I told you it was taken by Ansel Adams?"

Katherine is teaching them not just to think for themselves, but also to see for themselves -- a subtle difference that the movie doesn't grasp so well as it moves along, with all its noisy pronouncements about the benefits (and drawbacks) of unconventional, modern lifestyles like the one Katherine has chosen.

But the sight of that Soutine slide, jumping up in front of these silly, self-important girls like a sexy demon from hell, is invigorating beyond belief. The painting, by 1953, is already more than two decades old, but it's news to them, and we feel their surprise like an electrical jolt. It's one of the moments in which "Mona Lisa Smile" works on us in spite of itself. We've been zapped not by the shock of the new, but by the shock of the old: The familiar moment when the sympathetic, outsider teacher stands up in front of her sassy pupils and teaches them a thing or two.

In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, "Mona Lisa Smile" is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike. The minutes drift by pleasurably and mindlessly. Its attempts to provoke thought are as ethereal as the smoke from a burned bra, but by the end there's no doubt you've just seen a movie. For the past two hours, you've been soaking in it.

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