Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Legally Blonde (2001)
Now this is a movie that’s aged well. There’s a smorgasbord of delightful things about this movie, but I think my favorite is that structurally, it’s a reverse Hero’s Journey; rather than go on a journey of discovery herself, Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods enables everyone around her to go on one.
Unlike something like Clueless (also brilliant, but in a very different way) this isn’t a movie about a coddled under-achiever, someone who was living up to low expectations who then learns what to do with her life. Quite the opposite! As the movie opens, Elle Woods is at the absolute pinnacle of her world. She’s president of the sorority, people come to her for help and advice, she’s well-liked and respected in her community, everyone in her orbit is proud and impressed. She has the quality of someone who’s about to 100% a videogame—all she has left is one more achievement to unlock, getting married to the prize hunk, and then she can put it on cruise control. She’s already won.
So when her jerk boyfriend decides to become her jerk ex-boyfriend, her attitude is less heartbreak and more an irritation at a job left incomplete. The other people in her orbit advise her to leave it, be happy with the 99% run, but no. She pursues him to Harvard not as a lovesick dumpee, with with the energy of someone loading up Breath of the Wild muttering “okay, the last shrine has to be around here somewhere.”
One of the other really great things about this movie is that it never treats Woods as being less-than. She gets into Harvard not becase she pulls a favor or a trick; she legitimately has the smarts to do it over a weekend. She wasn’t going there before not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to. The reason “Like it’s hard?” became such a meme for a while was this—this is a character for whom it really wasn’t hard, and has now deployed that talent to a new domain.
A critical part of all this is the way Witherspoon plays her. Woods is never embarrassed or ashamed, her low points come from the culture shock rather than “learning a lesson.” And always with dignity and a rock-solid sense of self. There’s never a moment where she doubts herself, or rejects her roots, there’s no scene where she throws out her pink jackets. But even more critically, she’s not stupid. She knows things are different “here” than back “there”, but also pink is a great color, and if they can’t see that that’s their problem. You get the feeling most people would play the part as either vaguely self-delusional or recoiling; Witherspoon goes the other way, and plays Woods as legitimately confident, and gives her an air of slightly pitying these “elite” kids for how small their lives are. She knows she’s right, and she’s willing to give everyone else a chance to catch up.
Her lowest point in the movie comes at the non-a-costume-party-after-all party—which one suspects is only in the movie so they’d have a shot of Reese Witherspoon dressed as a Playboy Bunny to put in the trailer. But this is one of several places where Witherspoon picks up the slack the script leaves; as written, her line when she realizes her jerk ex is going to stay that way is something like “I was never good enough for you,” but she delivers it in a way that makes it clear she is thinking the exact opposite. Again, not heartbreak, but irritation at herself for the wasted energy.
Her attitude attitude then is basically to shrug and say “well, I’m already here, so how hard can this be?” And, from that point on, the movie delights in reminding us that Woods is as smart or smarter than all the rest of these dorks, she just knows different stuff, and constantly reinforces that being an expert in two worlds is more powerful than just being an expert in one.
The movie is very careful to present the world at Harvard Law as different, but not better. The lives and ambitions of the ladies at the nail salon, or the women back at her sorority in LA, are just as important as the dorks in law school. Her friends from back home coming out to support her unquestioningly is directly contrasted with the backstabbing nature of the law school, and not in the school’s favor. They might not know much specifically about what’s going on, but they know who their friends are.
The engine of the rest of the movie is Woods knocking down challenge after challenge as the people around her grow. The other characters have to learn to put their prejudices aside, expand their views of what counts as expertise, reconsider what matters. Meanwhile, Woods plows forwards, the mere fact of her presence acting as the catalyst for their growth.
(Topic for a film class: Elle Woods is basically the monolith from 2001, discuss.)
Her core flaw is an inability to see when people are bad. This isn’t presented as naiveté, but as her own default optimism being used against her and turned septic. Every time someone in her life acts against her—her boyfriend dumping her, the dad from Alias taking a pass at her, Liz Sherman lying about the party—Elle’s reaction is more to be mad at herself as anything, “How could I not have seen this?” Most importantly, the lesson isn’t to lose her optimism, but to cut the toxic people out of her life faster.
These things all click together at the climax, with Woods in court for the first time. The text of the script is ambiguous about what happens at the ending: did Woods luck into a solution or was that her plan all the time? But the glint Weatherspoon puts in her eye as she snaps the trap shut makes it clear—Elle Woods has finally learned how to turn these people’s expectations against them, and she has nothing left to learn.
She’s now achieved the pinnacle of success in two worlds. The people around her, on the other hand, have much left to do.