The screenwriters reportedly based this screenplay on Hillary Clinton's experience at Wellesley in the early 1960s. The film shows a school which teaches, above all, that a woman's duty is to stand by her man. If Clinton learned that, she also learned a good deal more. No doubt she had a teacher as inspiring as Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), who trades in the freedom of Berkeley for a crack at Wellesley's future corporate wives.

The board of trustees is suspicious of Katherine Watson, modern art and everything else that is potentially "subversive," and resistance among the undergraduates is led by Betty (Kirsten Dunst), whose mother is a trustee, whose plans include marrying a morally shifty Harvard man, and whose editorials in the school paper suggest Watson is leading her girls in the direction of communism and, worse, promiscuity.

The movie is more observant and thoughtful than you'd expect. It doesn't just grind out the formula, but seems more like the record of an actual school year than about the needs of the plot. The audience gets to be both teacher and student--you can imagine yourself as a free spirit in a closed system, and as a student whose life is forever changed by her.

But the characters are involving; we sympathize with their dreams and despair of their matrimonial tunnel vision and, at the end, we are relieved that we listened to Miss Watson and became the wonderful people we are today.