I had hoped that Callie Khouri, the writer of Thelma and Louise making her directorial debut with The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, might be able to drain the syrupy and neurotic excesses of the novel and find a leaner more appealing take on the story for the screen.

Alas, she has not. Initially, though she has been trying to direct a film since Thelma and Louise, she did not want to direct this picture. She wrote Thelma and Louise so she could direct it, but it was so good it attracted more established talent. She wrote the screenplay for Something to Talk About, but her star Julia Roberts had approval rights in selecting the director, and she was passed over again.

So, after a decade of trying and missing, she accepted the opportunity to direct The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood. Since the film is competent and doing decent business, it no doubt serves the director’s purpose. She will certainly get to direct future films. But the film is no favor to moviegoers or fans of the book.

There are wonderful actresses filling the roles of the four ladies who formed the Ya Ya sisterhood as children. Fionnula Flanagan, Maggie Smith and Shirley Knight rally around their friend Ellen Burstyn during the many crises of her life. Why non-American talents play two of four Southern ladies is unclear and feels awkward.

Vivi, Burstyn’s character, has had plenty of crises. The film begins in the present as Vivi has stopped speaking to her daughter Sidda, a playwright living in New York City, played by Sandra Bullock. Sidda has been interviewed by Time magazine and has said some things about her family and growing up that her mother has taken great exception to. The sisterhood, minus Vivi, drugs and kidnaps Sidda. They bring her home to Louisiana to try to explain to her why she must forgive her mother and make the effort to breach the standoff between them. To do this, they have brought the sisterhood scrapbook, and in a series of flashbacks, as Sidda looks through the scrapbook we see the complicated and troubled past of Vivi and Sidda.

Ashley Judd plays Vivi in the flashbacks as gamely as she can, but the movie doesn’t fix the central problem with the book. In both incarnations,we are told repeatedly how wonderful and special Vivi is. This assurance is supposed to help us over her obvious faults. But the central premise is never convincingly proved. Though she’s had hard times that win our sympathy, her faults feel larger and more real than her supposed charms.

Vivi is bitter, angry, arrogant, monumentally selfish, controlling, withholding, abusive and, despite the theoretical liberating and supportive qualities of the sisterhood, gruesomely dishonest about her past. Her need to protect herself from her past and wallow in past losses has had a devastating effect on her husband and children. She’s the kind of woman who tells others to just “get over it” but can’t begin to manage to do the same. Each of her three friends seem more appealing.

When the gory details of her travails are revealed, we’re relieved for Burstyn because she gets to stop acting like such a screaming crazy, but we’re dismayed that for so many years everyone around her has had to in-dulge her adamant demand for silence.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood isn’t terribly painful to sit through. It’s fun to see so many talented actors, both women and men. The period cars and fashions are great eye candy. The soundtrack is excellent, an eclectic mix of all the flavors of music that pour into the culture of Louisiana. But since this so-called “women’s movie,” which ultimately doesn’t say anything very complimentary about women, will eventually play in heavy rotation on Lifetime or some other women’s television outlet, there is no need to run out to the theater to see it.

Copyright 2002 Ad Media Inc.