Maybe there has never been a great time to be a teenage girl, but the 2000s were a particularly rough decade. It was an era where late night hosts treated young women like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan as verbal punching bags. Where The Man Show and South Park dominated Comedy Central. And where the styles being sold to young girls kept getting more and more feminine, even as culture increasingly treated anything and everything “girly” as inherently worthless and embarrassing. The explosion of bubblegum pop in the late ’90s (itself a reaction to the subversive riot grrrl feminism of the early ’90s) unleashed a deeply misogynistic backlash that would last for over a decade.
Needless to say, it was a pretty surreal time to come of age—one that Millennial women like me are just starting to fully unpack now. But looking back at my own teenage years, what’s even more remarkable is the brief burst of early ’00s comedic filmmaking that seemed to offer a preemptive lifeboat for the choppy waters ahead. In the span of just a few years, Miss Congeniality, Bring It On, Josie And The Pussycats, The Princess Diaries, and Bend It Like Beckham briefly reclaimed the much-mocked “chick flick” with a sneakily subversive edge of female empowerment. It was a trend that peaked with the overt messaging of Mean Girls in 2004. But the crown jewel in the “self-love rom-com” canon is unquestionably Legally Blonde, which turns 20 this week.
Based on a manuscript by Amanda Brown, the story of sunny sorority girl Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) and her surprise success at Harvard Law School immediately endeared itself to a generation of viewers. Legally Blonde grossed $141.8 million worldwide, launched Witherspoon as a full-blown movie star, and eventually spawned both a lackluster sequel and a charming Broadway musical adaptation. Legally Blonde is a cultural touchstone whose popularity has never really wavered. The movie reportedly compelled a bunch of real-life women to go to law school, and has definitely inspired any number of graduation speeches. A highly anticipated third installment is set to hit theaters in May 2022.
In the 20 years since its release, people tend to talk about Legally Blonde in one of two ways: as frothy, featherlight fun or an underappreciated feminist masterpiece. It’s either Animal House for girls or Norma Rae in pink. But while the former makes it sound trivial and the latter makes it sound didactically moralistic, it’s the way that Legally Blonde’s form and message intersect that really make it something special. Legally Blonde isn’t just a revolutionary feminist text of early ’00s cinema; it’s also one of the savviest, best-paced comedies of its era.
To begin with, the whole movie is a bait and switch. Legally Blonde very much opens as a rom-com. When Elle’s hunky, law-school-bound boyfriend Warner Huntington III (Matthew Davis) dumps her because he needs to “marry a Jackie, not a Marilyn,” she’s convinced that all she needs to do is follow the classic romantic heroine playbook: Use some gumption and just a tiny bit of stalking to follow Warner to Harvard, thwart his new brunette fiancé Vivian Kensington (Selma Blair), and win him back. It’s not hard to imagine a version of Legally Blonde that plays that story straight, or at least pivots to a major love story for Elle and Emmett (Luke Wilson), the sheepishly supportive young lawyer she meets on campus. (The latter is the structure the Broadway musical uses, much to the detriment of Elle’s agency and independence.)
But as Elle comes to realize that marriage doesn’t have to be her sole goal in life, Legally Blonde slowly morphs from a romantic comedy to a courtroom one. The movie’s form evolves to suit its function in a way that speaks to the savvy, subversive nature of its storytelling. Legally Blonde is, frankly, smarter than it needs to be, both in its message and economic plotting. Though contemporary reviews wrote it off as a lesser riff on Clueless, the similarities are fairly surface. What makes Legally Blonde work is the sense of ambitious intelligence that immediately emanates from Witherspoon’s bubbly yet sharp take on Elle, who shares a touch of the same drive Witherspoon had brought to Tracy Flick a few years earlier.
Right off the bat, the script by 10 Things I Hate About You screenwriters Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith makes a point of establishing that Elle is smart. When a saleswoman spies an opportunity to take advantage of “a dumb blonde with daddy’s plastic,” Elle immediately sees through the manipulation. It turns out Elle’s fashion merchandising degree isn’t just for show, she knows it’s impossible to use half-loop top-stitching on low-viscosity rayon. And she can spot when someone is trying to sell her last year’s dress at this year’s price. Unlike Alicia Silverstone’s charming guileless Cher Horowitz, Elle isn’t clueless. She’s just got an aesthetic and a set of interests that don’t align with the mainstream idea of serious adulthood.
In that sense, Legally Blonde is a closer spiritual successor to 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Marilyn Monroe played another “dumb blonde” with a surprising depth of specialized knowledge. And as in that Howard Hawks film, there’s a level of self-aware camp that first-time feature director Robert Luketic brings to Legally Blonde. The film’s opening tracking shot wanders through an absurd fantasia of life at the Delta Nu sorority house, where cheerleading practice, group workouts, and mid-afternoon margaritas are the norm. Witherspoon’s performance and Luketic’s direction work together to create a finally honed tone where you can still laugh at Elle, even as you’re rooting for her too. Her earnest, bikini-clad Harvard admissions video essay (directed by “a Coppola”) is patently absurd, but so is the way that everyone around her keeps underestimating her.
Legally Blonde is about the type of people we deem “important” and the type of people we thoughtlessly write off in a world that considers bubbly femininity to be inherently vapid. Though Elle has an arc about learning to own her intelligence and ambition, she mostly functions as a character like Paddington Bear or Ted Lasso, who makes the world a better place by the sheer force of her confidence and optimism. Legally Blonde takes an archetype who in any other film would be a catty, judgmental mean girl, and instead makes her one of the only characters who doesn’t judge a book by its cover. Elle is kind to everyone she meets—from scatterbrained beautician Paulette Bonafonté (Jennifer Coolidge) to a nerdy classmate struggling to land a date. Her sorority-honed sense of sisterhood is clearly a net good for the world. And while she’s no pushover, Elle is incredibly magnanimous when it comes to giving people a second chance.
The single most revelatory thing about Legally Blonde is the way Elle and Vivian slowly start to become friends as Vivian warms to Elle’s unflappable integrity and compassion. Transforming women from romantic rivals to allies was the sort of thing that very rarely happened in late-’90s/early-’00s pop culture, where female characters were often deemed worthy by the way they stood in opposition to other kinds of women. Though there are elements of Legally Blonde that haven’t aged well—particularly its reductive, very early ’00s depiction of gay men—I’m still always kind of blown away by the scene where Vivian first extends an olive branch to Elle. As Vivian and Elle share a laugh over their thoughtless boss and Warner’s general incompetence, Blair and Witherspoon lock into a conspiratorially giddiness that rings so true to interactions I’ve had with other women when some external form of sexism has given us an unexpected sense of solidarity.
While there’s never any doubt that Legally Blonde is the type of movie where everything is going to work out okay in the end, Vivian’s redemption is one of several places where there’s some genuine surprise to how it gets there. The other is the way the screenplay unexpectedly reverses the position of Holland Taylor’s Professor Stromwell, who’s introduced as an uncaring authoritarian, and Victor Garber’s Professor Callahan, who’s introduced as a tough-but-fair mentor. The moment Callahan calls his blonde protégée into his office only to sexually harass her is a brutal twist that hits the audience as hard as it does Elle. Like 9 To 5, Private Benjamin, and Working Girl, Legally Blonde is part of a long line of “fluffy” female-led comedies that tackled workplace abuse and harassment long before the #MeToo movement made the topic mainstream.
The fallout from the harassment scene is where Legally Blonde is at its smartest. Elle handles herself confidently in the moment, deflecting Callahan with a cutting quip. But the experience completely rattles her confidence and almost causes her to drop out of law school entirely. Legally Blonde understands the snowball effect of harassment and abuse—the way that even women who ostensibly escape “unharmed” can, in fact, be deeply harmed by the sense that the only thing they’ll ever be valued for is their sexuality. And Legally Blonde understands how women can participate in cruel systems of victim blaming too. Despite the thawing of their relationship, Vivian immediately jumps to the assumption that Elle is sleeping her way to the top.
In the end everything is made right by Stromwell and Emmett—one of cinema’s best male feminist allies. (As McCullah explained, “We always called this the Luke Wilson role as we were writing it. They auditioned a bunch of other guys and we’re like, ‘How about auditioning Luke Wilson for the Luke Wilson role?’”) But it’s Legally Blonde’s willingness to get into some heftier territory that makes its goofily buoyant, My Cousin Vinny-esque courtroom climax land so effectively. Rolfe Kent’s sweeping, old Hollywood score lends the perfect mix of earnest emotionality and winking self-awareness to Elle’s hair-care-inspired legal victory. And while the idea that Elle is a “diversity candidate” for Harvard is a joke, the notion that diverse lived experiences can help improve our legal system has a kernel of truth to it.
If you were making a list of all the things a “feminist” movie should try to do right, Legally Blonde checks off nearly all of them—particularly by the standards of 2001. Yet, crucially, it never feels like a movie that exists first and foremost to tick boxes. There’s an artistry to the way it zips along on its own comedic wavelength while keeping its feminist themes churning below. In fact, the filmmakers even reshot an unsatisfying original ending that foregrounded Elle and Emmett’s relationship for one that delivered the ultimate example of what screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna calls “and-a-man” rom-com storytelling. Legally Blonde’s closing graduation speech puts Elle’s self-actualization front and center, and uses her sweet, subtle chemistry with Emmett as the cherry on top.
Like Elle herself, Legally Blonde’s bright, buoyant aesthetic made it all too easy to dismiss by those who didn’t want to see the film’s depths. Yet for those who did, Legally Blonde offered a hot pink life raft in an increasingly dark cultural moment. Between its endlessly quotable dialogue and instantly iconic costuming, Legally Blonde earned its place in pop culture history with a confidence worthy of its protagonist. And 20 years later, Elle’s star is still as bright as ever.
Next time: With Jungle Cruise on the horizon, we look back at the “adventure romance” genre—from The African Queen to Romancing The Stone to The Mummy.
161 Comments
Any excuse…
Graham Norton (and The Graham Norton Show) are international treasures.
Absolutely love this movie. I saw it opening weekend during a really tough time – my grandfather was hospitalised that day while dying of Leukemia on the Saturday and my mum gave me some cash to take my sister to see a movie to get her mind off it. We went and saw this and I remember loving it and the levity it brought during such a tough time.
Australian director (Robert Luketic) too!
This retrospective makes me want to watch it again, because honestly, I’ve never understood its popularity. I really like 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless, but this one always just seemed pretty dumb to me, and I groaned a lot more than I laughed. But maybe I wasn’t in the right mood when I watched it.
I came to all three of these movies very late, probably 15 years after they came out, so I don’t have that contemporary connection to them. But I liked them all, I prefer 10 Things and Clueless because their high school settings are more energetic and the ensemble casts get a lot to do, Blonde has strong supporting characters but Elle is the focus. It’s more adult in its fantasy, but it’s really good in that mode and it’s because Witherspoon nails the sunny, persistent vibe. I think instead of Tracy Flick, the better comparison is Vanessa in Freeway — completely opposite on the socio-economic spectrum, just as indomitable.
Freeway is an great underrated dark comedy. It’s a pity that the terrible 2003 comedy Tiptoes basically destroyed the career of writer/director Matthew Bright (he hasn’t made a film since).
“My dick…may not function…but I still have my smile.”
One odd side effect of the popularity of the movie is that the old clamshell Mac laptops, especially in the orange (tangerine) color Elle uses, command a decent resale value even today, when they are 20 years old
It’s one of those fabulously delightful things which date it so specifically to 2001. Apple’s stuff was finally becoming popular/cool again after the dregs of the 90s. Our school got its first iMac in 99 before getting a crop of 10 for the multi-media lab, as well as a bunch of these laptops. They were great for editing but useless as fuck otherwise because they couldn’t network with anything else the school had at the time.I had to buy a new laptop about six months after this came out and I had the choice between one of those Clamshell ones and a Dell. I chose the latter. Bad call – it was a total hunk of shit which suffered multiple catastrophic hardware failures after less than a year and I ended up replacing it after two.
Dude you got a Dell
Oh I know it was a terrible mistake hahaha! The Toshiba I replaced it with lasted for my final year of school and my entire university degree so it proved a much better model. These days I’ve got an Acer ROG laptop as my home computer and a MacBook Pro as my work/travel computer and they’ve both been great over a number of years (not that I’ve been able to travel much since March last year though).
Man, I worked in school districts in the mid 2Ks and it’s amazing how many of them had gone all in on the iMac G3s. Those things were a nightmare to deal with. 90% of the time the CD-ROM drive didn’t work, and the USB slots were used for the keyboard and mouse. So, to load software from a USB drive, you had to sacrifice one or the other. And since they’d sunk a huge (for the time) investment into these machines, they kept them way too long. I was still seeing G3 computer labs as late as 2012.
Bloody hell! Schools tend to hold on to shit decades after they should move them on. First school I went to in the early-mid 90s still had the 1981-era green on black display computers from when it had first opened. Just before I left they replaced them with those very shitty mid-90s Macintosh models.Second one I went to still had an Apple II in the classroom in 1996 which was awesome. By 1997 they went all in on a bunch of PCs which had internet access which was very cool.
I really miss how colorful consumer electronics used to be in the late 90s/early 2000s. 11-year-old me considered his clear purple Game Boy Color to be just about the greatest thing ever and 34-year-old me finds it hard to disagree. I gotta go digging through my parents’ basement next time I visit…
I think I was like 24 when I got my clear purple GB and I thought it the height of sophistication.
Dude my gorgeous computer is a freaking RGB light showthat’s today’s colors. I change it up every day or two. Or let it do the rainbow thing. How much more color do you need exactly
Someone once said to me around that time that Mac makes two kinds of computers, Barbie ones and James Bond ones. They’re either bright and bubble like, or sleek and dangerous. I think they’ve moved the Barbie model mostly into phones now, but it really did fit at the time.
Honest question; why didn’t she buy a pink one? I’m pretty sure they made that, no?
You’d think, but no. The colors then were Tangerine (orange; like Elle got), Blueberry (light blue), Graphite (grey), Indigo (dark blue), and Key Lime (green).
Orange is the new pink
Aw, I’m so glad to see this movie as part of this feature. It’s such a great example of how something can be a lot more intelligent than it appears on the surface – and even using those surface judgments to make the point.One of the things I love most is that, even though there’s a great deal of suspension-of-disbelief needed for the credibility of the courtroom scenes, Elle figures out the true killer because of her roots as a woman who’s into all that traditionally feminine stuff that’s so easily mocked. It’s such a great statement about how you can grow without having to sacrifice or change who you fundamentally are. And for women in particular, the film has such great things to say about how you don’t need to limit yourself by what the world thinks of you.I also saw a version of the musical and was disappointed by how Elle was still obsessed with Warner and only doubled down on the hard work of becoming a lawyer because Emmett was literally forcing her every step of the way. It severely undermines almost everything great about the movie.
YES. In the musical, after Elle is humiliated at the party where she shows up in costume, it’s Emmett who convinces her to buckle down. In the movie, she herself has the epiphany about how Warner deep down doesn’t respect her and she herself who deals with that pain by determining to prove him wrong. Much better and stronger choice.
The movie reportedly compelled a bunch of real-life women to go to law school.As in forced/obliged/pressured women to go to law school? So much for feeling comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life.
That actually seems like an accurate use of the term. What did I miss?
compelled has multiple meanings, here it means driven or inspired…perhaps in this usage it is closer to “impelled” but impelled can also mean forced instead of driven or inspired. If you find something “compelling” you don’t find it “forcing”…it’s very possible that this use of compelling is more from common usage than dictionary definition but it is not a disputed usage
Women in my graduating class from law school definitely felt obliged to apply their attention to detail and high undergrad grades to apply to law school and fight to positively improve the world as lawyers. But I think many underrepresented students who are “cabapable of being anything” feel obligated to apply themselves to something considered prestigious (in the US) like law school.
and that’s how the best and brightest get trapped into working for corporate america 😀
Respectfully, I’d argue that you are conflating the ways “compel” is used as an adjective/noun with its more limited range of meanings when used as a transitive verb.I’d have no quarrel if the wording was that the women felt compelled or felt a compulsion to attend law school.
Well, that’s how it’s used, take it up with Humpty Dumpty
Exactly who, pray tell, is using it this way? As someone with quite a bit of formal training in the English language, I am very much in favor of creative/non-standard usages. I double checked my gut reaction against several academic sources before I even bothered with this comment.But just about everything I read (including the OED, which IME takes a similarly expansive view of the English language) seemed to confirm that while there was a certain amount of fuzziness regarding the various derivations (especially adjective/noun forms), the transitive verb continues to retain a more constrained range of meanings.
“Was compelled” is used as “felt compelled” but I really don’t give a shit if you learn that, ta.
Arguably in that construction “compelled” is acting more like a participle adjective than a noun. It also sounds like you might be British, which might account for our different impressions of which forms mean what in everyday usage. As it happens, I have a doctorate in the English language—but linguistics wasn’t my research specialty, so I guess I probably do have a lot to “learn” from random, angry people on the Internet.
Phizzled, who says elsewhere in this thread that they went to law school, seconds that it was an acceptable usage. But really, you have a lot to learn about everyday usage. A one second Google search came up with these and more:https://www.news8000.com/why-i-march-people-reveal-what-compelled-them-to-join-march-for-our-lives/https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriavouloumanos/teachers-share-experience-that-made-them-change-teachingBut keep being wrong
LOL—did you actually read these stories before picking them as your examples? Both are instances of “compel” being used as a verbal adjective —precisely the scenario in which I acknowledged that it encompassed a wider range of meanings than the way it’s used here.But look—you’re the one casting a mostly ironic and increasingly esoteric argument with some Internet rando in increasingly moralistic and personal terms, so I’m completely willing to admit that your lived experience with compulsion carries far more weight than my academic hair splitting.
X compelled Y to join march for our lives
X compelled Y to teach
Legally Blonde compelled women to go to law school
Legally Blonde The Musical is one of my all time favorite musicals based on a movie. (along with Heathers the Musical and Evil Dead the musical.)
The first Broadway show I ever attended was Spamalot, which was pretty good but taught me you could just watch the movie for the millionth time instead of the cash-in.
Never saw Spamalot (the original many times of course). I mostly remember the mini-scandal about Dubya’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice (who was on leave in New York) spending the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans watching it on Broadway rather than cancelling her vacation.
That’s a LOT of pink in that crowd
I love this, and had the broadcast of it saved on a DVR for years. Main complaint is that MTV couldn’t be bothered to record it in HD. In 2007! I had HD, why didn’t they?
I have to admit – and maybe it’s because I watched it for the first time only last year – I don’t really get the love for this film. Or, to put it more accurately, I can understand why there’s an audience for this film, but it didn’t really do anything for me. I find it so precisely follows the Hollywood comedy formula that was especially big at this time that I just struggled to really engage with the story at all.And that wouldn’t be a big problem if I found it hilarious, but it only got a couple of laughs out of me. Compared to Clueless, which I think still holds up as being genuinely, consistently hilarious, Legally Blonde felt a bit more generic and predictable.
Yeah, I saw it when it came out and didn’t care for it—unsurprising reaction for a teenage boy—and then watched it again a couple of years ago in a conscious attempt to reevaluate it and…I still didn’t much care for it. I can see it being surprisingly subversive and intelligent for it’s time, but it’s just not that funny.
It’s been awhile since I watched it start to finish, but I remember it being more clever and subversive than straight-up hilarious. That said, there are some quietly funny lines and scenes and a lot of things that will ring true to women in general.
well, did you see Clueless for the first time recently or back in the 90s? That could explain a lot of it
I happened to see Clueless for the first time in 2015 because my local cinema was doing a 20th Anniversary screening.Had a great time but Paul Rudd was very distracting because he looked he could have stepped out of that film and straight into the present day.(Statement still valid in 2021.)
I saw Clueless for the first time maybe a year or two before seeing Legally Blonde? I certainly have no childhood affection for it or anything like that.
Yeah that’s the biggest problem for me too, the lines just aren’t that good. It’s a very, very broad comedy, and while the themes may be slightly subversive, I just didn’t think any of the comedy was particularly engaging.
Light-hearted huggable courtroom dramas seem to always be a well-received. See also, “My Cousin Vinny” and “From The Hip”
I did not like this one. That she is actually smart because she knows a lot about… fashion! is not a great selling point. And, ugh, I know it’s a movie, but one studying montage later and you are getting into Harvard Law is just awful in so many ways.
I know, right? Yale, sure, that would be enough. But Harvard would require at least two montages to get in.
UCLA, a frame or two.
Somewhere Mr. Burns has read your comment and is enraged.
Fun fact: Yale is actually the #1 ranked law school in the US. Harvard is #3.
For Brown all they’d have to do is show her drawing a breath…
I honestly find it insulting to Harvard that there was a study montage at all when daddy could’ve just wrote a check.
The movie actually implied that’s what happened for Warner. Elle, despite having wealthy parents, apparently got there on her own merits with her excellent LSAT score.
Its been a few years: wasn’t the studying montages just about studying for the LSAT? My recollection was her GPA was 3.9ish already.
She had a 4.0 GPA and yes, the montage was for the LSAT. She was a smart and hard working student before she got into Harvard.
4.0 I believe.
In biochemistry?
Very few of the criminal lawyers or prosecutors I graduated with had degrees in hard science. Very few of the engineers I started law school with had 3.9 GPAs from undergrad.
Not sure where that is going, but you seem like you know stuff. A 3.9 can mean oh so many things that tend to get interpreted poorly by some.
A not uncommon career path for scientists who don’t get tenure is to go back to law school and become a patent lawyer, which is aided by having a PhD in a relevant science. I know a couple of folks who went that route. Granted, they tend not to be “traditional” law students as they are in their 30s or even 40s at that point.
Amost every patent attorney I’ve ever known has just had a bachelor’s, unless they were a biologist. I think I’ve worked with maybe two partners with a PhD in twelve years as an attorney, though, admittedly, I don’t usually ask because I don’t care.
I think they made it clear that she had in-depth knowledge about things that went far beyond just fashion, though much of it was fashion-adjacent. Her rattling off of the chemicals involved in beauty salon permanents made it clear that she could easily apply that still to other fields had she wanted, and certainly her studying her butt off to pass the LSAT shows she can learn anything she sets her mind to. Also, being the valedictorian of her Harvard Law class likely didn’t require her to plumb her fashion and beauty knowledge once the trial was over. The point was that she had the ability to conquer any field she wanted.
Because obsession about fashion is the definition of shallow. That you could take that talent behind your knowledge and use it for something more useful and important is not an interesting character step for me, it is being a human 101.
Loving fashion is “the definition of shallow” only because of sexism. There’s nothing about fashion that makes it inferior to any of the other more ‘respectable’ passions that people pursue. Which is actually part of the point of Elle’s character, that she’s given an interest that is stereotypically used to denote shallowness and not only is shown to be otherwise, but her knowledge is useful.
Caring foremost about appearances and not daring, gasp, to be caught wearing last year’s model, while millions of people make $3 per day to make these clothes to prop up your ego is the exact definition of shallow. or perhaps those other people, who are mostly women, do not matter.
Caring foremost about appearances and not daring, gasp, to be caught wearing last year’s model while millions of people make $3 per day to make these clothes to prop up your ego is the exact definition of shallow, or perhaps those other people, who are mostly women, do not matter.
Her knowledge of the model, though, wasn’t about not being caught dead in it, it was to show her acumen in showing up the saleslady who was playing her for a sap and trying to rip her off. And you’re right about working conditions around the world, of course, but your logic would assume that the clothes made by these people are only the ones you would deem a shallow person would wear. People make a lot of clothes, and we wear a lot of clothes, and the money adds up either way.
She would have bought it otherwise? Does anyone else wonder if this exact plot was originally intended for Doris Day in the 1950s? Little Women is more progressive than this. Some people love this movie, fine, but its foundations are a lot weaker than maybe they think.
But you misunderstood the intent of the scene you’re criticizing. Is it otherwise shallow? Sure, I guess, but the point was to show that she’s capable of realizing when someone is trying to take advantage of her. You could have the same scene take place in a chocolate store. In which case, your criticism might be world hunger?
I did not bring up that scene in particular. Was anything in her wardrobe from last season is the point. Enjoy your fine film, which the reviewer indicates has enduring genius and may just be a feminist classic.
Maybe you need to watch The Devil Wears Prada. Fashion is art. Being devoted to fashion is no worse than cutting off part of an ear.
But why isn’t it a great selling point? That’s how law school works. You need to be good at the LSAT and have good undergrad grades but you don’t actually need to know about law. The whole point is that she is extremely diligent about facts and details, there’s no reason why that wouldn’t set her up well for the LSAT.
All the people who could not do that because they did not have the resources, including not needing to pay their own way through school, for starters.
lol heard all you need is above a 175 out of 180 on the LSAT and you get in anywhere, even if your undergrad school or grades aren’t amazingnot to say that’s easy, but I’ve looked at the test (as I bet a lot of people have when they have that Elaine Benes moment) and it isn’t dependent on knowing anything else except how to take that test
Logic problems. My sister who scored ridiculously well on the LSAT said her best preparation was all the logic problem puzzles we liked to do.Oh, and she took it on a whim with only a little studying to keep her friend company. Wound up 99th percentile and felt she had to go to law school then.
that’s like showing up to an audition with your friend and you get cast…only you’re being cast down into hella lot of tests will have one area where if you can just manipulate abstractions a little bit you have a big advantage, because some people think very concretely. sounds like logic games is that one here
“That she is actually smart because she knows a lot about… fashion! is not a great selling point. ”Real talk: Why not? Fashion is an incredibly complex system that combines a lot of aesthetics and in depth practical knowledge (see: Elle’s Rayon smackdown). Would she have been more acceptably smart to you if she had studied, say, medieval history?She was a strong student with a lot of community leadership activities who crammed hard for an LSAT.
That’s a helluva thing to let bother you about this excellent movie.
No. Her purposely pursuing an Mrs. degree, as they used to be called, and needed being dumped to knock that shit off and be an actual person is. She could just have skipped all of that and not dug herself into a hole so that she dig herself out of it. It was not interesting. We can also discuss your irrational love of this formulaic trifle.
So you’re mad that she started out with flaws, and then grew as a person and became more actualized? You think the movie would have been better if she had just skipped her character arc? Yeah, that’s an even weirder hill to die on.
Her problems are 50 years out of date. Wait – I can have a job? I don’t just have to get married? Who knew! Have you even seen this film?
Your original complaint was about how she really isn’t all that smart and that she got into law school too easily, but now those goalposts seem to be moving. Yes, I’ve seen it and was able to enjoy the performances, tone, and storytelling without getting hung up on what I wished the movie could be. The character went from being smart but shallow and misguided to someone who discovers her own agency. You seem upset that the movie tells that story because…it’s been told before, I guess?
You like it, fine, enjoy. I found it mediocre. I brought up more points as other people posted; yes I did that. I will come up with a longer list at the outset next time but just did not bother to about a film that I do not want to see again, written about by a reviewer who I do not think is very good at analyzing films. This genre overall suffers from being formulaic almost as much as sports films, so the ones that stray from that formula might be more interesting. That some people cannot cope very well with someone not liking their favorite film is also a good reason to skip this column. I will go watch Clueless instead. Cher as a teen understands that adult women can have jobs, in the legal profession no less.
I mean, LB is all about personal growth. Sure, Elle starts off as a woman who just wants a man and a rock on her finger, but she comes to realize that her dreams could be so much bigger and that she’s capable of so much more.
Some people take to the LSAT incredibly quickly. I know people who have gotten scores in the mid-170s (Harvard range) after a week or two of studying. Really the three unrealistic knocks on the montages of her applying to law schools are:1. That she starts off in the montage with a very low score and is able to increase it by 30ish points. It’s not impossible to have such a high increase, but the LSAT is very much about raw test-taking ability, so a lot of people hit a wall after studying for a bit. Still, her character is meant to be hardworking and motivated, so this is just a tiny nitpick.2. That she submits an application video. Some law schools actually allow you to do something like this (I remember when I applied to Georgetown law they had an option to make a video explaining why you should be admitted), but I don’t think Harvard has ever done that. But again, not very outlandish.3. But the most unrealistic part of the scene is that she’s seen as a borderline candidate who gets in on the basis of T&A. She has a 4.0 GPA and a very high LSAT (I think it was like, a 179?) which makes you absolutely a lock at Harvard unless your personal statement is a white supremacist manifesto. Stanford and Yale, which are both actually harder to get into than Harvard (they have smaller class sizes) look more at soft application factors (i.e. work experience, community involvement) where I could see Elle maybe getting dinged, but admitting her should have been an easy choice for the admissions group.
You’re misreading the movie. She’s not already smart because she knows a lot about fashion, she’s already smart, period. Fashion is just what she likes, so she’s focused on it. When she decides to focus on law instead, she gets good at that rapidly, because she is still smart.Nearly the entire point of Elle is that people only see the blonde, pink fashionista and assume she’s an airhead with a specialized set of skills, when in fact she’s an extremely intelligent young woman who just happens to be blonde and like pink fashion, the two are not related, and why did you think they were, exactly?
also funny because isn’t going to a trade school being very adept in a specialized area of knowledge that one has an aptitude for without that meaning that there aren’t other areas one could excel at given the opportunity? But if I said that it was unbelievable that a car repair guy could be actually smart in other areas because he knows a lot about…CARS, I would be being a classist dick. I think the OP needs to watch the movie again, clearly did not get the message. Shit, talk to the guy at the end of the bar and I bet he could tell you how much time is left on all of the contracts for the players on his favorite teams, maybe he should have been a lawyer!
Probably not, most lawyers can’t do contracts for shit and just use ancient templates.
Because that is the exact premise of the film.
Yes. One of Legally Blonde’s biggest statements is that high femmes should be taken seriously and not discounted because they are attractive/made up/girly. Hedy Lamar was a genius, after all.But the great thing about LB is that its feminism doesn’t end there. In a lesser movie, Vivian would have been the snobby blue-blood who either deserved Warner or who was not right for a nice version of Warner. (While Vivian does commit a few small feminist sins—assuming that Elle is shallow because of her looks, assuming that Elle is sleeping with her professor, being a jerk to her fiance’s ex—those sins are somewhat mitigated in that Elle initially feels the same way about her—assuming that Vivian is a man-stealer and a hopeless snob.) Instead, Vivian is more that what she appears to be. Sure, she is aa “Jackie” from old money, but it hasn’t made her averse to personal growth. She’s Elle’s match in brains and grows to be Elle’s match in kindness. I always love rom-coms that position the leading lady’s romantic rival as a decent human being instead of a terrible person who will get dumped as soon as the leading man discovers her true character. However, neither Warner nor Emmett is exactly the leading man. In some ways, Vivian and Elle are the true “romance” at the heart of LB. The start off in the same position of misunderstanding as Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth and Darcy and slowly realize that they’re perfect for each other.
I think the idea is that she has a great deal of potential for knowledge when she applies herself to a subject. She knows a lot about fashion because that’s what has most interested her up to that point. Her lack of knowledge in other areas is mostly just for lack of interest and application. So when she decides she wants to learn law, she proves to be good at it.
Equally awful is the well-worn plot device that led her to Harvard in the first place. I’m tired of seeing “girl follows boy to school of his choice,” or “girl adopts whatever interests boy has,” or “girl learns skills boy knows.” All of this effort is put into gaining or reclaiming the affection of another character, as if the protagonist has no goals and desires apart from (or more important than) chasing after someone else. So, I cannot like or respect that character from the start. Since stalking and obsessive behavior is not cute or funny, my view of them goes even further downhill. Movies like this make me hope they’ll snap out of it before they waste too much time or commit to something they can’t take back. I cheer when the character chooses a different school, realizes their own dreams are most/equally important, or sees the person they were chasing wasn’t worth putting on a pedestal. Sure, Elle does some of this, but she discovers her calling within the framework of following someone else’s path. Ugh. That feminist movie checklist mentioned should start with “woman doing her own thing.” That’s why 9 to 5, Private Benjamin, and Working Girl were superior to this.
There’s a lot of condescension towards fashion that doesn’t apply to other arts. Knowing about painting or porcelain is legitimate intelligence, clothes not.
I love this movie. It was the first movie I owned in DVD, and I got great use out of the DVD.Recently my daughter was in the hospital for 3 weeks (she is fine now). This movie was in loop at the hospital. My daughter is now an expert on this movie too.
Just rewatched this, it was still so good and funny, and it really was a different energy for the time. Elle doesn’t have to edit out parts of herself, there’s no rejection of her other girly friends like other movies would do, she’s not a this or that character.It also solidified Jennifer Coolidge as a forever gay icon.
Bend and snap!
This movie was the first PG-13 movie I saw in theaters. It’s been near and dear to me always. As pointed out in this review, there’s a subversiveness under its gloss that, while it doesn’t directly acknowledge, is omnipresent throughout the movie. I do kind of love that Emmett (adorable, supportive Emmett) is treated similarly (albeit much more humanely) the way female love-interests are treated in male-lead comedies: a bit of an afterthought, but definitely present.
Eh, not for me. My biggest sticking point is that I never really bought the conceit—that a wealthy white woman faces “discrimination” at Harvard because her aesthetic and mannerisms are different from those of the other wealthy white women at Harvard. I get that it’s really about the “proper” forms of femininity women are expected to display in professional spaces, but I feel like the film also goes for a class angle (or at least an Old Money vs nouveau riche angle) that never quite sits right.
The real ridiculous point is how Elle goes Boston from LA and is seen driving to Harvard over the Tobin Bridge, which is like having a person drive from LA to San Francisco and enter the latter via the Golden Gate Bridge. Did she get lost and wander up to Lynn? Come on, filmmakers.
Elle feels a bit nouveau riche, but I think part of the discrimination is geographic. Elle is a Californian while Vivian is pure East Coast. (By extension, LB’s subtext seems to be that Hollywood people who make movies aren’t so dumb. Take that, Harvard grads who work at McKinsey.)
The fact that you can rattle off all these “subversive” films in a supposed era of terrible backlash suggests to me that it wasn’t actually some singular dark age for women. Historically there’s never been a “great” time to be one in our society, but I think it’s more a product of myopically re-evaluating when we were young, rather than than truth if we ascribe some singular valley to the late 90s and early 2000s. There have been thoughtful, progressive films in every era.
But…. South Park existed! Late show hosts were making jokes!
The Man Show and Maxim! The objectification of women was going unabated dammit!
Late night hosts (white men) were making jokes about the mental health and substance use issues of women who had been oversexualized and harassed from a very young age. Sounds hilarious.
That’s what the signature collar tug and strained expression for shrugging off a knowingly awful joke was for.
Not to mention the literal countdowns to the 18th birthdays of underage celebrities like the Olsen twins.
“Late night hosts (white men) were making jokes about the mental health and substance use issues of women who had been oversexualized and harassed from a very young age. Sounds hilarious.”They made jokes about that, yes, and thank God it’s over. However they also made jokes about anything they could, even the Menendez brothers after all the awful abuse shit came out. The lesson here (and it’s a good lesson today): don’t take positions on people or issues if it’s packaged in a joke. Jokes are necessarily distant and pithy, and make complex things simple. Complex things should stay complex. Turn off “funny” journalism.
Look, it was clearly the worst time in the history of mankind for women. And I say this as someone who grew up in the 70’s and (ugh) the Reagan 80’s.
/s
Those films were a sort of antidote to the rest of girl-focused popular culture. That doesn’t actually discount the other shit she named. “What are you complaining about, Miss Congeniality was a hit” isn’t a great counter argument to “a lot of late 90’s/early 00’s stuff was bad.”
This kind of reads to me as someone saying that times can’t be too bad for Black people because Black Panther was a hit.The early 2000s was the nadir of toxic celebrity culture, with the cementing of the 24-hour gossip news cycle and the reality TV boom. I think there’s a good argument that it would be a particularly harmful time for girls to grow up.
“The early 2000s was the nadir of toxic celebrity culture”Dude it was a fucking MACHINE. I was in public relations at the time. What a nasty, slimy time. If the Internet didn’t explode, we’d be like Britain at this point.
sure guy.
Some people sure get mad when sexism is pointed out
My college roommate/current longtime bestie definitely was pushed toward law school by this movie. And she’s a blonde. 🙂
During Crim Law 1L year our professor surveyed the class about seminal legal films. Of 80ish 1Ls, almost all of us had seen this and To Kill a Mockingbird, 2/3s had seen My Cousin Vinny, and less than half had seen 12 Angry Men or Paper Chase. He was disappointed that 12 Angry Men wasn’t well known anymore, but did a medium-dive into the reasonableness of Legally Blonde’s central case. Anyway, I hated law school but Legally Blonde is comparatively breezy and fun.
12 Angry Men is so fucking good. It and Anatomy of a Murder (and…okay, yes, A Few Good Men) are my favorite courtroom dramas.
The Rainmaker!
12 Angry Men and a Baby
I loved The Paper Chase (even though I never went to law school) mostly because of John Houseman’s adversarial Contracts professor role (which he actually reprised in the TV show spin-off!).
I watched 12 Angry Men in English class as a high school freshman in 2002, and while I do remember thinking it was great, what stood out most to me was when juror #12 opened his mouth for the first time and it was fucking Piglet.
You just sent me down an iMDB rabbit hole on this one, and whilst it was fascinating, you now owe me the 10 minutes of my life I spent crawling through juror #12’s previous credits searching for Winnie the Pooh when, in fact, juror #2 was Piglet.
I know it’s just an aside here, but Marisa Tomei is capital-G Great in My Cousin Vinny.
is it weird to say that Marisa Tomei is still underrated for that movie? and as an actress overall, of course
Well, she won an Oscar for the performance so, yes, I think it would be weird to consider her “underrated” in the film.Frankly, I think her performance is overrated. And that’s not to say I didn’t find her very charming.
Crazy and awful that there was that “she didn’t really win!” talk around her win for so long. Look at the other roles she was up against, they collectively had less of a cultural footprint than Grumpy Cat, while Tomei’s role is well-remembered and well-loved.
Oh man, “cultural footprint” is NOT the thing you want to give away awards for.
Maybe not, but it renders all that “he read the wrong name” shit even more transparently ridiculous.
Why not? Why not reward work that is impactful, rather than merely competent?
It’s a better reason than ‘flatters the egos of the aged voter base’ metric that seems to dominate today.
When I saw this movie for the first time years ago (as a high school age boy) a lot of the subtext flew right by me. I have seen a lot of articles/think pieces about it recently though which makes me want to do a rewatch; I am guessing I would appreciate it more. Incidentally, I loved Josie and the Pussycats at the time, which was another movie that was packaged as one thing but really about something else.Also, I know I am going to catch hell for this but I never liked the iconic “what, like its hard?” line. It struck me as way too flippant and privileged.
I think the line is supposed to be deliberately over-flippant – Elle knows that it’s hard to get into Harvard since we’ve just seen her working really hard to do so, but is trying to unsettle her ex (and trying to hide the fact that she’s working hard to get back together with him) at that moment. (That said, it’s fair to say that the movie isn’t particularly interested in exploring Elle’s privilege generally speaking.)
Ah, thanks for that – clearly been awhile since I have seen it and my context of the line was off.
My single favorite bit from the entire movie is when Elle meets Warner at Harvard for the first time. He’s shocked to see her and tries to imagine a reason for her to be there other than that she’s a student. Finally, he’s forced to ask, “You got in?” Elle responds with an amazingly flippant, “What… like, it’s hard?” Iconic sass.
Something hilarious; I had this exact experience at art school.
I had a friend who talked up and down about how hard they worked on their portfolio to get accepted. Two years later, when I was ready for college, I discovered the same school had a BFA program I was interested in, so I submitted my portfolio/transcripts and got accepted. Said friend was incensed.
– “How did you get in?!”
– “Uh…I applied and they said ‘yes’?”
(we were not friends for much longer after that)
Recent law school graduate. While studying for 1L crim my study group frequently discussed Legally Blonde–more as a way to relax while kind of/sort of staying in the law mindset. I truly adore that movie.
Please consider doing Confessions of a Shopaholic! I know it’s a very cheesy movie but it is one of my absolute favorites to watch!
It’s not hyperbole to say that I think this is one of my favorite movies of all time? Not everything works, like the stuff at the salon, but the stuff that does work, just works.
1) I am really surprised to see this discussed as a romantic comedy… I mean, I guess it is but that isn’t really what stuck from it.2) It’s weird to read about this critique about the way we discussed pop stars in the 90s and then click a link to Rabin specifically referring to Britany Spears as “ a dead-eyed, jailbait pop strumpet … who combined strong Christian values with a heroic commitment to providing masturbatory fodder.”
Wow. That’s quite the line by Rabin.
This is one of those movies where its real world impact is hard to overstate, I’ve heard so many women say it was a touchstone for them to have confidence in their professional lives, as well as to be more themselves in their professional and personal lives. The magic of the movies.fun fact: Mackenzie Davis played Elle and Antoni from Queer Eye played Warner in a production at the Neighborhood Playhouse: https://www.avclub.com/queer-eye-s-antoni-starred-with-mackenzie-davis-in-a-20-1834053456
I’ve only seen Mackenzie Davis in tomboy roles. Her “bend and snap” would probably blow my mind.
One other thing that I think makes this movie stand out is that even though Warner is the bad romantic pairing and is clearly closer to a villain than most of the other characters Elle’s age, he still doesn’t make the worst possible decision at every possible time. When he breaks up with Elle, it’s shitty and takes her by surprise, but he offers to give her a drive home so she doesn’t ruin her clothes. She doesn’t cartoonishly lash out, he doesn’t get a comeuppance, she just relents and he drives her home. Likewise, when she gets to school he’s skeptical but fairly polite instead of immediately trying to trip her up (Blair does this, but as covered, she comes around).
Even in a formulaic Hollywood comedy, having side characters make occasional nuanced decisions instead of just painting them in broad strokes to establish their character is a breath of fresh air. He does get more broadly villainous in the courtroom section of the film, but I think that illustrates the difference between him and Elle that underscores how fundamentally incompatible they are – that’s good character work too.
On top of everything you’ve just said, one of the reasons I think this movie holds up incredibly well is that it never really punches down… which a lot of the movies in that era (and of this genre) did…
The fact that Elle and Vivian were never monsters to each other, and were never simply mean, even when they were still very antagonistic toward each other, was so refreshing. It’s pretty rare for a comedy to treat every character as a probably-reasonable person who just isn’t having their best moment.
“She’s just got an aesthetic and a set of interests that don’t align with the mainstream idea of serious adulthood.”I really like this description but it immediately made me think of a different kind of woman — the infamous Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But Elle is independent and the MPDG exists adjacent to the guy, and the MPDG’s aesthetic/set of interests generally align with the guy’s non-mainstream adult ones, right?
Rewatching this a few months ago for the first time since it came out, the most refreshing thing about it was that when Elle tells Vivian and Emmett about her professor’s sexual harassment, they both instantly believe her. No hemming and hawing about it or anything.
It’s interesting reading this article when I just finished a rewatch of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s first season. One of my favorite running tropes of that show is that, no matter how much of a mess Rebecca’s personal life and decisions are, she’s really good at her job when she puts the slightest bit of effort into it. It’s somewhat similar to Legally Blonde in that way, which never gives us cause to doubt that Elle is very smart and capable, even as it has to deliver a lot of plot mechanics and character growth.
It’s not hard to imagine a version of Legally Blonde that plays that story straight, or at least pivots to a major love story for Elle and Emmett (Luke Wilson), the sheepishly supportive young lawyer she meets on campus. (The latter is the structure the Broadway musical uses, much to the detriment of Elle’s agency and independence.)It’s a relief to know that I ‘m not the only one who was really disappointed by this aspect of the musical.It’s got some great songs, but it really misses the heart of what made the movie not-just-another-rom-com. In the movie, Emmett’s role is basically just being a friendly face that helps Elle feel like not *everyone* at Harvard hates her. In the musical, he literally has to say “hey stop thinking about stupid girly things like hair and try studying instead.”
I worked in a movie theater when this came out. Even though I don’t think our dinky 5-screen theater ever had it, we had a TV in the lobby playing trailers and music videos. For a month or two, it played the Hoku “Perfect Day” video every 40 minutes or so. Just doing whatever and then you have to hear “SUNS UP/a little AFTER TEN” multiple times a day. I’m sure this movie is good and deserves the accolades, but I can not bring myself to watch it. That song gives me a reaction and I don’t like it. Maybe they can make a cut of it where that song has been replaced by something else. Literally anything else.
I think that song opens the movie so you could just start it on mute with closed captioning and then turn the sound on when she gets to Harvard.
FUN FACT: Elle Woods scored a 179 on her LSAT. Out of 180. Which means at most she missed two questions. Also, when I was studying for the LSAT I ran across the practice test that had the “if both opera and jazz are on all sale…” question in the studying montage and I giggled to myself in Starbucks for a full three minutes.
I remember the summer this came out. I was at the beach with my whole extended family. My dad, sister, and all my uncles and cousins went to see Jurassic Park III. But me, as a young 12yo gay boy decided to go see Legally Blonde with my mom and aunt and absolutely loved it. I still consider it one of the best decisions i ever made.
It’s not hard to imagine a version of Legally Blonde that plays that story straight, or at least pivots to a major love story for Elle and Emmett (Luke Wilson), the sheepishly supportive young lawyer she meets on campus. (The latter is the structure the Broadway musical uses, much to the detriment of Elle’s agency and independence.)See, I think the reason that works for me with the musical – which I, personally largely prefer to the movie – is that it grounds their relationship in allies first, then friends and then romance blooming right at the climax. Emmett never takes over Elle’s goals or motivations but being someone in her corner gives helps her be more confident to seek out other allies and to push herself to work harder & make sacrifices for something she’s realized she wants independently (the entire studying montage taking place over the winter holidays, wherein she also stays at school to keep at her books, comes to mind). In the meantime, knowing more about Emmett and the two of them learning each other as people makes the romance something more fun to root for IMO. Also, their spin on Vivian is really fun too, even if she ends up standing in a bit for Holland’s role.
Side question: why is the sequel so reviled? I really enjoyed it! I love how it demystifies the process of getting a bill passed, in an on-brand bubbly and fun kind of way. (I especially love how they used the Woodstock-editing in the “discharge petition” montage—really witty choice.)
I only saw it the one time back in 2003 but from memory I found it really unfunny and (without being able to remember the specifics of the plot) felt like it undercut what made the first one great.
And the bit with the gay dog (even more so than the gay pool boy in the first) hasn’t aged well. You can do humor about gay people (or I suppose, animals) but there has to be more there than “Ha ha! Isn’t the concept of gayness funny?”
“Genius.” lol