Let's face it, lilacs are an ugly shrub year-round, but we grow them because two weeks of fragrant blooms are worth 52 weeks of ugly. So it is with "Monster-in-Law."

Mostly, it's a bland, inoffensive comedy. The first 15 minutes, which show doctor Michael Vartan meeting temp worker Jennifer Lopez, are so bland that although I know people were saying a lot of words on-screen, all I could hear was, "Jane Fonda hasn't shown up in the movie yet."

But then Fonda, whose 15-year absence from the screen has already been lamented by me enough, shows up as Vartan's self-pitying, manipulative mother, and you think, "Yes. Here is the reason I'm sticking around."

Has any actress ever known how to use her voice better than Fonda? (That's a rhetorical question. The answer is "No."). She can make it brittle, she can go squeaky and nervous or rumbly and sultry.

It's an innately intelligent voice, with a quaver that lets us know this person isn't as strong as she pretends, and, when it works for comic effect (or when it needs to dress up a limp joke), Fonda can squeak with it, spit with it, hiss with it or growl with it. There is an orchestra in that voice, and it's probably no coincidence that Fonda's character here is named for one of the most versatile instruments in the orchestra: Viola.

Dolled up in a turban like all the great movie gorgons from Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford to Cruella DeVil, Fonda brings humanity to a role that could easily have been a cartoon, since Viola spends nearly the entire movie tormenting poor J-Lo. Fonda makes it funny, but it might be even funnier if we didn't feel that J-Lo deserves it.

Lopez is out of her element here. Although she brings a sexy, strong presence to roles in "Out of Sight" and "Selena," she vanishes into the background when she does comedy (Vartan is even less visible - he plays a role in the movie in the same way a light bulb does). The best that can be said for Lopez is that, when she eventually dons a wedding dress, she looks very at home in it, almost as if she wears them all the time."Monster-in-Law's" best support comes from Wanda Sykes in the cliched role of Viola's tart, wise-cracking assistant. Sykes' laid-back drawl is a good match for Fonda's high-energy delivery, and the fact that most of Sykes' best jokes come at Fonda's expense shows it's not Fonda's fault her other co-stars get blown off the screen, but the script's.In any case, the news here is not the movie but the movie star. Jane Fonda is back, and let's hope the movies can figure out how to plant her somewhere she can flourish.