”If you love Barbie, you should watch Legally Blonde,” Spouse said to me. I’d avoided it because something about the premise set me on edge. Still, it had stood the test of time, and if Spouse had enjoyed it, it must be a good film. Right?
Well. Where to begin.
We first meet Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) in her sorority, where her sorority sisters are designing and passing around a card for her. Now, I loved Witherspoon in Pleasantville, where she played a similar character to Elle’s: outwardly shallow, but actually intelligent and nice once you scratched past her surface. So I had great hopes for Elle. Alas, they were not fulfilled.
The more I saw and listened to Elle, the angrier I became—not at her, but at the writers. Here was a woman whom you are obviously supposed to assume is a “dumb blonde”, and who is at first acting like a “dumb blonde”. Yet we learn that she has a 4.0 average, and that she’s majoring in fashion design. That’s a stereotype in and of itself. Fashion designers are definitely not stupid people, of that I’m certain.1 Nevertheless, the fact remains: Intelligent people don’t act like this. Perhaps if they’re trying to play stupid, but Elle isn’t playing stupid. She’s genuinely obsessed with Cosmopolitan articles, mixers, famous women’s influencers, and makeup and nails. WTF?
It doesn’t work. I have nothing against the above list of items. But you cannot make me believe that a truly intelligent person—one who with a bit of studying (a very SMALL bit) got 179 on her LSATs, good enough to get into Harvard Law School—would be content to talk with her sorority sister friends about hairstyles and getting married without ever dropping in quotes from Dylan Thomas or referring to Schrodinger’s cat or something. I didn’t buy it.
And why would this intelligent woman care so much about winning back (ugh) a guy who is obviously treating her like an object? I don’t have enough backstory or depth of character to know why Elle loves Warner that much, so again, it rings fake.
But maybe it’ll get better, I thought. So I gamely kept watching.
SPOILER ALERT: It does not get better.
Elle stays in “dumb blonde” character throughout, even once she realizes that she needs to start taking Harvard Law School seriously. So she learns what to say in classes and has the Meet Cute with Luke Wilson and, of course, is chosen by one of her professors to help with a real legal case. Oh, and she makes friends with a manicurist and helps her get back her English bulldog. I liked that part, being the owner of an English bulldog myself.
The more I watched Witherspoon doing her best (and she is a great actress) with this horrid characterization, the more I winced. It didn’t help when a plot point hinged on an egregious gay stereotype, or when another revolved around a character acting like a complete idiot in not deciding to trust her attorney with her alibi.
You people are supposed to be SMART. This is not smart. This is dumb people imagining what smart people think like.
I did like a few things about the film. Victor Garber, Oz(good) Perkins and Linda Cardellini were unexpected, pleasant surprises. Luke Wilson was an expected surprise, who was also wonderful. All did their best with the mess of a story that they were given. And Raquel Welch shows up with a brief cameo, which…I had no idea who it was until I watched the credits. But why not. There were a few funny lines scattered hither and yon, as well. Mostly, though, I rolled my eyes a lot, with a few loud groans.
I confronted Spouse after I’d finished the movie. “This was nothing like Barbie,” I told him. “Why’d you recommend it?”
”Why, wasn’t it any good?”
Jaw drop. “You didn’t see it?”
”No. I read about it on TV Tropes.”
Mmmkay.
There’s a lesson here, somewhere.