Smile raises none

Julia Roberts plays a nonconformist art-history teacher making waves at a conservative New England girls' school in 1954. She wants to talk about Picasso but the syllabus insists on the Old Masters. The school promotes the thrill of driving husbands into ecstasies with lasagne, and Roberts repeatedly gets her knuckles rapped for talking about university and the will to earn a crust. Her students (Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal) slowly come round to her way of thinking, though - you know they have when they dissolve into tears of appreciation in front of a Jackson Pollock.

So, a kind of Dead Poets Society but with girls and pictures. Just what we need: a pyjama party posing as a movie. In his poem Fulbright Scholars, Ted Hughes describes a school photograph of Sylvia Plath taken in the year that this film is set. He mentionsher "Veronica Lake bang" and her "exaggerated American grin" - a perfect description of the girls on this screen. Their smiles come from under hair that seems too clean, teased into cute preppy fringes; they have the look of over-achievers.

Mona Lisa Smile is the kind of film that deems to champion being independent, free-wheeling, self-possessed women, while secretly wishing that the world was one big sorority house, a place where everyone is eternally 19 and surrounded by chums.

Director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) seems happiest showing the girls in the common room playing the cello in their curlers, or giggling over contraceptive devices before lights out. It's only Gyllenhaal-last seen having her rear bruised by James Spader in Secretary) who comes through all this with any zap.

This young actress has the feel of Mae West or Zsa Zsa Gabor, requiring not just men in her life but life in her men. She swings about the place on long dancer's pins, handing out cigarettes and advice. She is supposed to be the school loon, but is the only one with a coherent personality. Gyllenhaal is as bright and alive as Roberts once was. But now Roberts has turned into plastic, the grin intact. A grin quite the opposite of Mona Lisa's, and lately nowhere near as charismatic.

Mona Lisa Smile
Cert: cert12A