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"The person I wanted took a job at Brown and no one else was available, so here you are."

Catherine Watson in Mona Lisa Smile sounds like the perfect role for Julia Roberts, and that's the problem. I have no animosity toward the actress herself -- she is always perfectly charming, and this film is no exception -- but the characters she plays get tiresome very quickly. Everyone always loves Julia Roberts; Julia Roberts makes everybody happy. All fine for stuff like Runaway Bride, Notting Hill and even Erin Brockovich. But some movies don't mesh with that delightful inevitability; some stories won't allow all of their participants to be dragged kicking and screaming to a forcibly happy ending. Mona Lisa Smile needed more.

I usually enjoy these stories of institutional conformity (and eventually non-conformity), and this specimen is as engaging as you might expect, at least when its liberated protagonist is battling passionately with the stodgy old fogeys in charge of Wellesley College as well as with the younger women who share their mindset. It is with the numerous character subplots that problems arise. Catherine Watson is an ambitious art history scholar from Oakland State University who manages to land a prestigious professorship at Wellesley, the best and most conservative women's college in the States. The students quickly impress her with impeccable knowledge of the classics, and Catherine realizes that she must Challenge! -- their preconceptions by showing them things they've never seen before, and Redefine! -- their notions of art by asking them to consider the modern and unconventional.

The vast majority of the students and staff at Wellesley see their education as preparation for marrying a Harvard boy and becoming a perfect little wife and mother. The most militant of these traditionalists among the young is Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), who gets engaged early on and spends the rest of the movie trying to make Catherine's life miserable. She even has Catherine's housemate, the not-so-secretly lesbian school nurse, fired for giving out contraceptives. Grrrrrrrr. Kirsten Dunst, you're so evil!

Another girl, less ominously named Joan Brandwyn and played by Julia Stiles, is more open-minded, and though she is contemplating an engagement with the pleasantly bland Tommy from Harvard (Topher Grace), she is also considering law school. Catherine takes this as her cue to stage an all-out feminist assault on Joan's familial sensibilities, bombarding her with round after round of law school applications and other propaganda. Will she dump her boyfriend at the altar and run off to Yale Law? Maybe, maybe not, but you can rest assured that it is not beyond Julia Roberts' awesome powers to make her happy as well.

There are other less consequential characters. Marcia Gay Harden plays Catherine's second housemate, who is, hilariously, a teacher of "speech, elocution and poise." There is a male professor of Italian, knowing for having affairs with the students, who also inexplicably becomes Catherine's love interest. Ginnifer Goodwyn has a nice role as the most insecure of the Wellesley students, worrying about whether she can ever find someone who will marry her. Fans of Maggie Gyllenhaal (and there are plenty) will be pleased to know that she is perfectly cast as the campus floozy who admires the new art history professor.

Formally and technically, Mona Lisa Smile is almost unassailable. Mike Newell, who recently nabbed the directing gig for the fourth Harry Potter movie, establishes an elegant, unobtrusive rhythm and visual style. Julia Roberts is convincing, if very Julia Roberts-ish, as the beleaguered feminist, and Kirsten Dunst is very impressive as the villainous conservative, vanishing into her role to the point where I forgot it was her, something that is difficult for me to do. Marcia Gay Harden is hysterically funny in one of the film's only ambiguous roles ("I love Lucy. Even though she was a communist").

So the script by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner establishes a tolerable cast of characters inside a generally well-constructed, engaging film, but then it loses its grasp on the situation. It is as if the screenwriters reached page 120 and realized that they still have all of these subplots and supporting characters that haven't been given any sort of closure, and so they quickly forced everyone and everything into a nice little happy ending envelope and ran for the hills. I refuse to believe that Julia Roberts came to Wellesley, saw these complicated people with their complicated problems, and proceeded to make them all unfailingly happy in 115 minutes. And everybody loves her. Ugh.