DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD []

More yada yada than Ya-Ya. Running time: 116 minutes. Rated PG-13 (mature thematic elements, language, and brief sensuality). At the E-Walk, the Lincoln Square, the Battery Park City, others.

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PERHAPS it’s a surfeit of 21st-century irony that detracts from the overall enjoyment of this Southern-fried slice of schmoopiness.

Or maybe it’s just that the contrivances employed to extract tears – the measure of success for a sentimental, female-skewing film – are as stale as a day-old biscuit.

Which is a shame, because there are some delightful moments in this old-fashioned tale of familial dysfunction.

It’s just that director Callie Khouri seems never to have met a “chick flick” cliché she didn’t like, from the ubiquity of emotional telephone conversations to the lachrymose (but entirely predictable and dramatically flabby) reconciliation at the end.

Working from two immensely popular books by Rebecca Wells, Khouri – the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Thelma & Louise,” making her debut behind the camera – seems to lose her way almost immediately.

Juggling five different time periods and three different casts would be a challenge for any director, but Khouri fumbles the chronology so badly, it becomes hard to sort out which character grows up to be which.

The opening scene takes place in late 1930s Louisiana, with four young girls engaging in a ritualistic declaration of their immortal friendship, spawning the sisterhood of the title – providing the first of many increasingly irritating opportunities for the chicks to shout, “Ya-Ya!”

Cut to half a century later, and the prepubescents have grown into a crusty group of garrulous “Golden Girls” knockoffs who drink Bloody Marys, flip each other the bird and sometimes say – gasp! – “a- -.”

Three of the Ya-Yas (Fionnula Flanagan, Shirley Knight and an emphysemic Maggie Smith, trailing an oxygen tank) stage an intervention after the fourth member, Vivi (a fresh-scrubbed Ellen Burstyn), has a falling out with her successful Manhattan playwright daughter, Sidda Lee (Sandra Bullock), over some unflattering comments Sidda made about her to a Time magazine reporter.

The Ya-Yas spirit Sidda away to a secret hideout and, with the help of a dog-eared scrapbook, attempt to explain the demons that plague her histrionic mother.

And so begins a confounding series of flashbacks, into which a radiant Ashley Judd, playing the younger Vivi, thankfully injects some passion. (James Garner, playing Vivi’s henpecked husband, also manages to make a silk purse out of his sow’s ear of a role.)

Khouri has composed some winning scenes – the sequence in which the young Vivi helps Sidda overcome her fear of flying is a joy – but doesn’t spare us a barrage of unsubtle greeting-card aphorisms.

Still, it’s best to pack a Kleenex or two: The disclosure of Vivi’s deep, dark secret, when it finally comes, is so anti-climactic, you’ll cry tears of frustration.