Cinema
Legally Blonde (12, selected cinemas)
No surprises
Mark Steyn
Legally Blonde is the old fish-out-ofwater caper — think Robert Taylor in the groves of Brit academe (A Yank at Oxford) or Goldie Hawn in the army (Private Benjamin) or Dale Winton in the Taleban (still in development, alas). This time round, it's a blonde at Harvard Law School — one of those high-concept, low-motive summer movies that did well enough in America to still be playing in theatres after the autumnal equinox.
The blonde in question is Elle Woods, president of her sorority house at 'California University' and a Bel Airhead of dizzying blondeness who's majoring in fashion merchandising. On an even more major date, she's convinced that her blue-blood beau, Warner Huntington III, is about to get out the old six-carat Harry Winston and pop the question, but instead he gives her the heave-ho, explaining that if he's going to be a senator by the time he's 30 'I need to marry a Jackie, not a Marilyn'. Elle hath no fury like a woman scorned. Instead, after a week-long bonbon binge and two manicures, she determines to prove him wrong about her, by following him to Harvard Law School, which is not the most obvious move for someone whose resume highlights are an appearance in a Ricky Martin video and second place in the Miss Hawaiian Tropic contest.
The best thing about Elle is that she's played by Reese Witherspoon, one of those actresses you're surprised to discover can act. Since the film is about lookism, we may as well be lookist: Miss Witherspoon isn't one of those rounded, soft blondes. She has a sharp, pointy little chin, and, no matter how much fluff and cutesiness is in the air, she can give sharp, pointy little performances — see Cruel Intentions, Pleasantville and Election. That's just as well, because in this movie she's pretty much the whole deal. There are, technically, other actors involved, but they're merely feeds for Reese, minimal characters pared down to a single consideration — what the star needs in any particular scene. A Boyfriend Who Drops Her. A Stuck-Up Rival For His Affections. A Sympathetic Ear. A Wandering Hand.
Despite this limitation, the film in its early scenes trembles tantalisingly on the brink of greatness. Elle's acceptance at Harvard is daffily plausible. Her perky summation of her qualifications, delivered while wearing a spangly bikini in her application video, so befuddles the Law School's tweedy bow-tied admissions panel (who look like a faculty room circa 1934) that they decide to admit her on the grounds of — what else? — increasing diversity. She arrives at Harvard in pink leather clutching her Chihuahua (if you'll forgive the expression) to be greeted by universal condescension. Her fellow students include Warner and his new fiancee, a preppy East Coast brunette prune, and row upon row of pallid, snooty drudges in beige clothing. (The film gets just right the peculiarly sexless couture favoured by Ivy League students.) At a getting-to-know-you session, the classmates are invited to introduce themselves and talk about their other interests: one explains that she organised her local branch of Lesbians Against Drunk Driving, another that he's spent the last year deworming children in Somalia. When it comes to Elle's turn, she says that two weeks ago she saw Cameron Diaz buying this hideous angora sweater in Fred Segal but luckily was able to talk her out of buying it because orange is definitely not the new pink.
By this stage, Robert Luketic, an Australian director taking his first shot at the big time, has us all rooting for the blonde: Cosmo princess versus Ivy League snots? It's no contest. We want Elle's indomitable, irrepressible spirit to triumph in the arid wastes of Cambridge, Massachusetts. But Luke tic and his screenwriters, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, have exhausted their flair and the film settles back into a standard hit-making-by-numbers comedy. There are some token humiliations: the snots invite Elle to a party but tell her it's fancy dress, so she shows up as a Playboy bunny. But this joke was better done in Bridget Jones's Diary, and had the added comic ballast of Renee Zellw-eger's bum. All the things you predict will happen happen, culminating in the scene where Elle tells Warner that, if she wants to make partner before she's 30, she needs to marry someone who's less of a jerk. The only surprising thing is that there are no surprises.
The writers themselves seem confused as to whether grooming and styling really are the root of all wisdom, or whether Elle's expertise in this area merely obscures her natural intelligence. Or, alternatively, whether she's just a gal in an unburstable bubble. It doesn't matter. Reese Witherspoon's comedic gameness holds a charming trifle together for 90 minutes, exhausting herself only at the end when she's obliged to deliver the picture's concluding homily that 'you must always have faith in yourself. There's a thought — though, for a film predicated on the notion that one should never judge a book by its cover, it's not much of a closing paragraph.
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