Blonde ambition: Legally Blonde reviewed in 2001

In Legally Blonde, the candied future of Elle, an amiable – and naturally blonde – sorority princess played by Reese Witherspoon, crumbles when her boyfriend Warner decides his desired career in politics requires him to marry “a Jackie not a Marilyn”. When something this catastrophic happens, what’s a girl to do but follow her dream – even if it’s a six-carat Harry Winston engagement ring? And so Elle packs up her world of fluff and flounce and trails behind Warner to Harvard Law School. From here on in, this airy satire floats along enjoyably enough, enlivened by quips about the incompatibility of Elle’s ”Malibu Barbie” lifestyle and Ivy League self-importance.

The script (by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who wrote the Shakespeare-inspired teen comedy 10 Things I Hate about You) keeps up the pace, but it’s Legally Blonde’s attention to and parody of status symbols and gestures that earn the film its higher scores. Hollywood glitz clashes with East Coast old money, fun fur with tweed, silicon with red brick, a heart-shaped notepad with sleek black laptops. 

While debut director Robert Luketic has some barbed fun with both worlds’ ridiculous affectations, it’s Elle we’re supposed to be gunning for. Luckily, Witherspoon projects an astute mix of genuine affability and game over-exaggeration in a role that would have been Alicia Silverstone’s five years ago.

And, just like Clueless, in which Silverstone starred, Legally Blonde strives to point out that girls like Elle wield a tenacity equal to their daddies’ bank balances and that the effort which nails-n-nuptials obsessions consume can be transferred into something less trifling. In a neat touch, Elle’s climactic courtroom triumph relies on evidence that only someone like her can provide: few other lawyers could spot a pseudo-heterosexual through his knowledge of shoe design or confuse a witness into confession by asking technical questions about hair perming.

Although this might echo the plot of, say, My Cousin Vinny, where an outsider (Joe Pesci’s bluecollar New Yorker) gains a freak court victory and we’re warned not to judge people on the basis of appearance, we have to remember just what kind of underdog Elle actually is – namely an eminently photogenic and impeccably groomed one. While the film smirks at Elle’s preoccupations, it eventually endorses the types of knowledge she has spent years acquiring. This is only to be expected considering that Elle, who lives next door to Aaron Spelling and gets a Coppola to direct her college-interview video, is herself pure Hollywood pedigree, living and breathing everything Tinseltown stands for. Legally Blonde cautions us that labels can be misleading – unless, perhaps, they’re the fabulous Prada ones that adorn Elle’s wardrobe.