by JOANNE LATIMER

It's 1953 at Wellesley College. Sorority girls take poise lessons while pretending to get a real education. When an art history teacher (Julia Roberts) arrives from California, she shocks the dowdy faculty and lights feminist fires under impressionable young beauties… Can't you almost see the determination on Roberts' furrowed brow? Can't you almost hear the musical score swelling when the girls turn into proto-women's libbers? Mike Newell, who directs Mona Lisa Smile, delivers a standard-issue Dead Poets Society-type film, and it's as measured and tempered as the Da Vinci painting that inspired the film's title. This is a simple comfort food for the frosty days of gender complication.

When meeting the faculty at Wellesley, Roberts is artless enough to admit she has never been to Europe. Bad move. And she likes Jackson Pollock. Adding insult to injury, she chooses to remain unmarried. Her students, as cruel as they are beautiful and privileged, treat her as a curiosity while they try to decide if she's cool or on the downhill slide into spinster misery. They're divided, of course, and distracted by their own dramas of birth control and marriage. Roberts tries to help without getting burned at the stake by the school's administration.

This is a fail-safe role for Roberts, whose plucky charms are set on high. What could be easier, from the perspective of 2003, than playing a defiant scholar - circa '53 - who was never duped into a career-killing marriage? The meaty roles here go to "the girls" - Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal - who have to shirk a lot of breeding to bust out of the Wellesley mould. Marcia Gay Harden almost steals the show as the poise instructor, while Juliet Stevenson adds ballast as the school's lesbian nurse. Newell knows this is a film based on strong performances, so he does well to keep the camera rolling and just let everyone act. What results is tone - that luxurious element so frequently killed by jittery editing. What's missing, however, is art. Why make a film about art history without it? Mona Lisa Smile shows us precious few slides, as if afraid to broach the subject - just like a polite Wellesley girl.

Mona Lisa Smile opens Friday, Dec. 19

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