This is as light of a comedy as you might imagine. I would have liked it to also be witty and to have taken at least some chances, but for light humor it worked very well.

Reese Witherspoon plays Elle Wood, who is one of those girls that you think most people would hate. This movie certainly doesn't, though. She is smart, pretty, and you just know very shallow and into looks. Life has probably given her almost no challenges, being a straight A student, the head of her sorority, and just as graduation is coming up is sure to be getting an engagement ring from her current boyfriend. Well, as it turns out, she is being dumped by her boyfriend because he wants to be a Senator by the time he is 30, and feels that he needs a more professional woman to do this. He tells her that he needs a 'Jackie', not a 'Marilyn'. Personally, I think having the type of girl Elle is in the beginning of his film would help his chances more, but that is just me.

Determined not to lose her man, she decides to go to Harvard Law to pursue him. I wish we were given some sort of reason why he was worth chasing, but I guess if he was too good of a catch we wouldn't want him to get his comeuppance in the end either.

Her parents and friends don't want her to waste her time going to Harvard. I'm not sure what they want her to do, but I'll mention a joke later in this review that is more depressing than funny. I never quite believed that she got into Harvard on the merits she tried to. We are told that she is smart, but I don't think just anyone can pass the LSAT as well as she did without a pre-law degree in College. She submits a videotape to the Harvard Law admissions department that was very funny. She says at a later point in the film that she got a Coppola to film it for her. The video has her using legal terms in everyday use, like when a guy whistles at her, and she screams out "I object!". It shows her in a bathing suit floating in a pool proving that she can remember little tidbits from yesterday's soap operas.

Why this movie works at all is because of the star. Reese Witherspoon puts this movie up on her shoulders and carries it for the whole 100 minutes. She has amazingly played so many different types of characters before she is twenty five that it is hard to believe. No two characters of hers are ever alike, although the closest she has come to playing someone like Elle Woods before would be her two-episode stint on Friends where she played Rachel's sister.

When she tells her parents what she is trying to do, her mother reminds her that she was a runner up in a Mrs. Hawaiian Tropic pageant, and asks why give that up for the law? Reese is amazingly good looking in the film, especially since she had a baby less than a year before filming started, but she is not a Mrs. Hawaiian Tropic pageant contestant. I'm a little stunned that any mother would be encouraging that anyway. And what exactly did she hope for her to accomplish with that title anyway? It is an odd line.

Reese truly is the focus that the entire movie revolves around. She is in every scene, and I feel like almost no character besides her had more than ten lines to say in the entire film. I really couldn't believe that she and Vivian (Selma Blair) would become friends so fast. And why did she act like she had never seen her dog before? Luke Wilson pops up at just the right time, says a few lines, and somehow at the end helps defend her, etc.. There is a relationship between a beautician and an UPS driver which didn't work because there was never any reason for him to have even noticed her before. Most of the side stories were just as empty and disposable.

I really wish the movie had taken some chances with making the character a little more true to her nature. A geeky guy helps Reese with research after she helps him out. What she does is pretend to be a jilted date so that he'll be more impressive to some stuck up girls who insulted him when he first asked them out. The girls, now believing that Reese wants to date him, throw themselves at the nerdish fellow. My problem is this: I doubt the bookworm would still want to date the first girl he asked out after the way she responded to his initial request. Logically, shouldn’t he then have asked out Elle since she at least showed him some kindness? I’m willing to bet she wouldn’t have dated him if he did ask.

Another scene that wasn't played out very well was where one of Elle's teachers makes a pass at her. I should probably put pass in quotation marks though, because what he does is put his hand on her knee after complimenting her work. She feels that all his praise now means nothing, when it is clear that he is impressed with her mind. Vivian watching from the door sees the teacher's hand on her knee and assumes that Elle made the pass? Huh? Even I couldn't believe how dumb that sounded, and assumed she was still trying to get her revenge on Elle by spreading a rumor like that. I think they wanted to keep it much more light hearted rather than have the teacher make a real pass, or threaten to fail her, or drop her from the case if she didn't date him.

The best line of the film may have been when after being rudely jilted to join a study group by a lesbian, who calls Elle a Barbie doll. Elle says, "If you had come to a rush party, I would have at least been nice to you", which is a really good line. But then the scene is ruined when she deflects an insult onto a woman who wasn't part of the conversation in what is almost a cruel way.

There were some clever uses of her fashion sense in the final court case. She realizes that a witness must be lying about an affair because he is gay. She figures this out because he commented on her Prada shoes, and Elle is certain that only gay men know designer names. However, I couldn't believe the hair perm solution. I assure you that I don't know much about hair care, but I have heard that you cannot wash hair after a perm. If the witness being questioned has had at least thirty perms in her life like it is stated, she would have come up with a better lie than being in the shower.

Another joke that I couldn't believe was when Elle is trying to teach a beautician how to do a bend and snap trick that makes you look good for a guy, and soon gets the entire beauty parlor doing it. At the end of the scene, a gay guy comes out and makes some reference to it, and than it cuts to a reaction shot by two dogs. I felt like I was watching a rerun of Love American Style.

I did laugh several times during the movie. It is funny, but just don't expect it to last in your memory much longer than it takes you to read this review.


Note: As a little bit of trivia, the dog in the film is the boyfriend of the Taco bell Chihuahua. Reese said on a talk show that the Taco Bell dog came to watch a shoot and everyone on the set got their picture taken with him. I would have loved to seen that in the outtakes or something.

Also: On my own review page I gave the film 3½ stars.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12