There is a scene in the classic Billy Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot in which a group of beautiful blonde women sit chatting in a train compartment. Then Marilyn Monroe enters and reduces the members of the female orchestra to a bunch of dull extras.
That, of course, was a different time, a time when Monroe could say Arthur Miller “wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde”, and it had some kind of mythic import. Today we only seem to have the blonde joke and all its permutations, of which Legally Blonde is one.
Reese Witherspoon plays an orange Los Angeles blonde, Elle Woods, who is convinced her rich boyfriend Warner Huntington III (Matthew Davis) is going to ask her to marry him. But Warner is on his way to Harvard Law School and needs some East Coast class, which means that Elle must go — away.
The first problem here is that one has to buy into Reese Whitherspoon to start with and, let’s face it, she is no great actress or comedienne, as Monroe most certainly was.
Anyway, our silly heroine, whose bible is Cosmopolitan, is naturally going to become grimly determined to gain entry to Harvard, make a fool of herself, start studying and possibly conquer, well, everything.
This is the bad blonde joke part of the movie. She is dumb but decides to become clever. And daddy’s money from La La Land can buy up stuffy old world Boston, just like that.
But like any good blonde babe Elle retains her mushy pink goodness, has a delightful pooch and a soft spot for her broken-hearted manicurist Paula (Jennifer Coolidge), who plays the downside of being blonde: fading.
This is not to say Legally Blonde is a bad film. It’s not. It’s often funny and even touching in places, even if it’s in a brash and trashy way; and it’ll probably do well at the box office, which is a consideration.
But it leaves one feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Is it a satire? Yes. Is it a comedy? A little. Is it stylised? Somewhat. Is it a women’s flick? Sort of. Realistic? Partially. Anti-men? Yes. Pro-men? Yes again.
In other words, it falters because it tries to be everything for everyone, but where it really falls apart is when it looks back to another era and turns to stone.