Legally Blonde (2001) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com/
"I even got a Coppola to direct my admissions video!"
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Holland Taylor, Matthew Davis, Victor Garber, Jennifer Coolidge. Directed by Robert Luketic. Rated PG-13.
Blondes may have more fun, but not if they're stuck watching Legally Blonde, a mostly witless comedy that is blessed with Reese Witherspoon. It's a featherweight romp that wants to flaunt stereotypes but instead winds up reaffirming them. Hovering somewhere between outright silliness and heavy-handed moralizing, the movie never decides where it wants to go or what it wants to be. This middle-of-the-road indecision keeps the farce firmly on the ground when it should be taking off.
Elle Woods (Witherspoon) is your classic, ditzy, stereotypical blonde. She has a 4.0 GPA in beauty school, spends her time reading fashion magazines and talking movie stars out buying "truly hideous angora sweaters." Her boyfriend, on the other hand, comes from an established family of congressman, and wants to be one himself. He dumps poor Elle because he needs someone "serious," even if they have no fashion sense.
Elle does not understand what it is about her that isn't "serious." Then she sees an article in a magazine and it comes to her: the love of her life doesn't want a fashion maven, he wants a law student! So she hits the books, takes the College Boards, gets "a Coppola" to direct her admissions video and voila! -- in the mail comes an acceptance letter from Harvard. If only it was actually that easy...
For a while, the movie coasts on Witherspoon's charisma and the inherent charm of the Clueless-goes-to-Harvard scenario. The brilliant Holland Taylor shows up as a tough law professor, immediately livening up the proceedings, and Elle's battle with the snobby Harvard types is amusing, if never brilliant (although the irony of Elle's own snobbishness, one much more egregious and less deserved, irked me). When Elle gets assigned to a murder case involving a fitness guru and takes all kinds of bizarre initiatives and learns all kinds of unwanted "lessons," Legally Blonde loses its bounce.
The final courtroom scenes, in particular, are counterproductive. Not only are they unfunny, easily the least clever section on the script, but they undermine the film's admirable, if unnecessary, "open mind" message. I was troubled by how Elle was shown to be incompetent in everything except fashion, fitness and hair perms. The movie wants us to accept her as sharp and intelligent, but prods us to laugh at her at the same time. Mainstream filmmakers -- or maybe their financiers -- always try to make movies that are all things to all people, and it invariably blows up in their faces.
What's worse, Legally Blonde doesn't have a sense of the ridiculous. You can feel director Robert Luketic trying in the courtroom scenes, but something always stops him from delving into the truly madcap. Thus we have time to question the movie and ponder its logic, something that should never happen in a movie as profoundly silly as this.
Witherspoon is a great actress, here playing the opposite of her Tracy Flick character in the infinitely superior Election. The movie's failure is not hers but the script's, which chooses the well-trodden path at every fork in the road, and sometimes even tries to take both paths at once. The Chihuahua is cute, though.
Grade: C
Up Next: The Score
©2001 Eugene Novikov
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