FILM REVIEW; A Rich Ditz Has Both Brains and the Last Laugh (Published 2001) (2024)

''Legally Blonde,'' a fluffy new fish-out-of-water, believe-in-yourself romantic comedy, includes one line that made me and some of my dyspeptic colleagues laugh giddily and helplessly. It's a throwaway bit of repartee, which I wouldn't give away even if the mildly vulgar punch line were suitable here. But then again I might, since the movie doesn't offer enough occasions for real spontaneous laughter to justify the cost of a full-price ticket.

The script, written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kristen Smith and based on a book by Amanda Brown, is the usual midlevel commercial comedy mishmash: a clear, easily digested and wildly implausible concept accessorized with hit-or-miss bits of physical and verbal humor, a fizz of light love trouble and a barrage of huggy, uplifting moments at the end. For every moment like the unquoted line, there is a piece of business like the ''bend and snap'' musical number in which the clients of a nail shop jiggle and shake, supposedly demonstrating a sure-fire way to snag a man's attention.

If the laugh-inducing moments manage to outnumber the cringe-inducing ones, it's mainly because the director, Robert Luketic, hands this overstuffed Louis Vuitton suitcase of a movie to Reese Witherspoon, a sharp, quick-witted Doris Day for our drab age of screen comedy. Ms. Witherspoon plays Elle Woods, a perky sorority sister who resides in a cloud of pink fluff at Delta Nu at California University in Los Angeles. (Viewers who had no social life in the mid-90's may wonder, as I did, if this is the same C.U. that Brandon Walsh and the gang on ''Beverly Hills 90210'' attended after graduating from West Beverly High.) Elle's perfect world is shattered when her preppy boyfriend, Warner (Matthew Davis), bound for Harvard Law School, dumps her on the night she had expected him to propose. He needs a mate with more substance ''if I'm going to be a senator by the time I'm 30,'' he explains. ''I need to marry a Jackie, not a Marilyn.''

Elle may be a squeaky-voiced shopaholic bombshell, but she's no dummy. Determined to travel to Cambridge to win back her undeserving man, she gains admittance to Harvard. There she discovers a student body of pale-faced grinds in dark clothes who hold her blondness and her taste in clothes against her and a faculty of imperious professors with patrician accents. But our heroine, who graduated from C.U. with a 4.0 average in fashion merchandising, turns out to have a steel-trap legal mind, lots of common sense and a good heart that draws her to a good-hearted young lawyer (Luke Wilson) and a lovelorn manicurist (Jennifer Coolidge).

Really, Elle -- not to mention Ms. Witherspoon -- is smarter than the movie, which doesn't quite know what to do with her, mocking her ditzy rich-girl cluelessness at one moment and admiring her moxie the next. The character as written is incoherent, but Ms. Witherspoon has the reflexes to make Elle both appealing and ridiculous. It's funny -- in that slightly queasy, un-P.C. Doris Day kind of way -- to watch her suffer tearful humiliations, and also funny to watch her recover her dignity and tell off the snobs and hypocrites who have underestimated or maligned her.

Among these are, in addition to Warner, a pompous law professor (Victor Garber) and Warner's new fiancée, a snooty Ivy League ice queen who, because she is played by the graceful, fine-boned Selma Blair, cannot be all bad. Virtue is rewarded, meanness gets its comeuppance and Elle, after a courtroom triumph too complicated and haphazardly staged to go into here, delivers the commencement address to the Harvard Law School class of 2004. ''You must always have faith in yourself,'' she concludes, surely the first time anyone has uttered such a notion in a Hollywood movie.