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The jock. The family man. The slut. The brainiac. The beauty. The man who acts like a boy. The girl who acts like a woman. These aren’t characters. These are stereotypes we have seen a thousand times before and probably a thousand more times in the future. These two-dimensional characters make up the cast of Beautiful Girls – a coming of age tale for the parenting-set.

I picked up the film for its folksy plot and great big cast that covers half of the DVD cover. Beautiful Girls seemed like an easy-going option. Unfortunately, the characters seem be easy-going themselves. Set in the perpetually-snowing, working-class Anytown, USA, New Yorker Willie Conway (Timothy Hutton) makes a rare trip back for his high school reunion. Waiting for his girlfriend to come down, Willie is left to mull whether to take the next step of commitment with her as he chats with his other romantically-challenged high school buddies who are pushing 30. There is Tommy (Matt Dillon), Mr. Popular in his high school glory days, but who is now is a sad former image of himself. In a long-term relationship with the beautiful Sharon (Mira Sorvino), he is having an obvious affair with his knockout, now-married high school girlfriend Darian (Lauren Holly). Then, there is hot/bone-headed Paul, who is in a slump after his long-time vegetarian girlfriend, Jan (Martha Plimpton), dumped him for a more committed meat-cutter. Finally, there is Michael (Noah Emmerich), a married-with-children standup guy who faces some conflict as he would rather be with his buddies than his wife (Anne Bobby).

With such a long and detailed plot description, can you spot the major conflict? Neither can I. That’s the problem with Beautiful Girls. There really is no major problem a simple talk can’t fix. What we get is an overly metaphorical screenplay from Scott Rosenberg, who tries to stretch a simple tiff into a meandering 112 minutes. Rosenberg, who is responsible for the scripts of movies ranging from Con Air (an okay blow-it-up actioner) to Kangaroo Jack (I feel dirty just typing the title) to a couple of canceled ABC shows, came up with the idea of the film while writing Con Air in his snowy Boston home. Tired of writing movies with more bullets than words, he was more interested in his friends’ conflicts with growing-up than scripting how Nicolas Cage could steal 50 cars in one night and be Gone in 60 Seconds. While I don’t mind movies where the action is more internal than external, the problem here is that none of the characters act outside of their stereotypical behaviors. Nothing ever comes full circle and no real epiphanies are made. Having Dillon’s tough jock character shed a tear really isn’t breaking the mold.

Driven by extended conversations, a feature I am sad to say rarely exists in mainstream Hollywood any more, nothing really new is brought to the table in either topic or delivery. One of the highlights is Rosie O’Donnell as a fast-talking, tell-it-like-it-is dame who spouts pearls of wisdom. Her hilarious walking while talking monologue halfway through the film about how the women in Penthouse and Playboy aren’t real women at all to the boys is one of the film's few signs of life. Again, her character is stuck with her never changing views of the world and is only utilized as a connecting device between the boys and the girls of the film.

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