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MeIt’s been 25 years since you became a movie star. In the last few years you have become a respected player and a power producer. A passion grows for youth-led games that out of passion or ice-hockey players appeal to a generation or two above. You are Reese Witherspoon. What do you do?
Download the IP of Legally Blonde, dust it off and create a mini-movie to reach the box office that turned out to be a huge hit, yes! You increase your chances of success by sending me a charismatic mini-me (Lexi Minetree) who manages to capture the charm and sweetness of the original protagonist, Elle Woods, and recreate the art of your creation by making her self-conscious without being silly.
This time, you make him a high school student instead of a graduate/Harvard freshman, and you restart the story of the fish by forcing him to get out of his Bel Air ass (courtesy of his father’s famous nose, which makes them go out of town) and transfer him to Seattle’s difficult (and, as we can be, where we are) new friends at a new school full of mean girls and boys who convince him that “pink is not a personality”. You hope this is enough to sound fresh and not enough to scare off your potential fans – I mean, look at Greta Gerwig’s Barbie! – they come flocking to relive the magic of the old magic. You call it Elle and put eight episodes on Prime Video. What if it’s difficult?
Well, maybe it’s a little more complicated than anyone thinks. Elle opens well, with Elle’s 16th birthday celebrations at the family’s mansion, attended by many of her friends, while they look forward to life as high school teenagers because of Elle’s goals of managing social politics, protecting the perfect first kiss with Hot Josh and being on top of the whole twisted plot in Days of Our Lives.
Unfortunately, the best laid plans go awry and from Woods he has to go live in the rainiest city in the US. They may be down, however, but they are not out. An irreplaceable prospect, your name is Woods. So while dad Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott) continues to thrive in his new job at a small company with countless Hollywood types and mom Eva (June Diane Raphael) revamps her rented beauty salon into something new, Elle meets and greets her new friends. “I have two subscriptions to Cosmo – one for archival, one for download. I love iced coffee, July and when people wear tennis even when they don’t play tennis!” It doesn’t work.
Not for Elle and, alas, not for viewers. The effervescence of the camp on which the film’s great success depends quickly dissipates. The new aesthetic – the screen is filled with dark purple, gray and camo-plaid tops on T-shirts – is depressing to look at (and the TV shows it, yes, it doesn’t matter) and the new characters are vague and, at worst, they wake up without humor that you start to hate some of them when you see them.
And the script takes a hit. Soon they lean heavily on high school drama pieces and folders – a difficult girl (with a secret), a love triangle, a new best friend with whom our heroine has nothing in common, good deeds of revenge, social deceptions (in response to the mix of lawyers in Legally Blonde, Elle ends up embarrassingly headlong at a shameful ceremony), – and so on, without new twists or enough killer lines to go with them. Although I enjoyed Elle’s dismay at LA gal pal Madison’s advice that the best way to bounce back after the death of culture is to have a baby or go on SNL. “But I’m a virgin!” cried Elle. And I can’t wait until Saturday!
Thanks in large part to the closeness of the Woods family (and two brilliant and generous performances from Minetree’s main cast) Elle has enough charm to get her through. In a world that needs all the harmless escapism it can get, Elle gets the job done. But it could have, because of his birth and his writing at the peak, become more. I bow down and SNAP, don’t give up.
