Steel Behind the Smile

Monday, Aug. 06, 2001 By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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Reese Witherspoon's parents have more degrees than a thermometer. Dad is a surgeon; Mom has a Ph.D. in pediatric nursing. They are under the impression, Witherspoon says, that someday she will return to Stanford, which she left after a year, to get her B.A.

Now that the success of Legally Blonde has finally certified her as a bankable movie star, returning to Stanford seems a remote possibility. And yet Witherspoon is keeping quiet on the subject. "I haven't broken it to them," she says. "They still think I'm going to finish."

Or maybe, like a lot of smart people, her folks saw the handwriting on the Cineplex screen some time ago. In the past decade (beginning when, at 14, she applied for an extra's job and ended up in the central role in The Man in the Moon, which was shooting near her native Nashville), she has made 17 feature films and had a recurring role on Friends. She even has an acting prize, from the National Society of Film Critics, for her work as a high school girl who will do anything to be student-body president in the delicious comedy Election.

The problem for Witherspoon, 25--a tiny thing (5 ft. 2 in.) who is as pretty as a glossy picture--has been her lack of mainstream exposure and perhaps an admirable reluctance to appear easily lovable. These are both matters that her new movie cagily addresses. It is a sweet, smiley-face comedy in which she plays a fashion-forward airhead pursuing a lunky hunk who has unaccountably rejected her. She follows him to Harvard Law School, where she discovers not only her long-buried IQ but also her inner feminism. It is really fun to see her (and her Chihuahua) unhinge Cambridge's assorted snots and snobs.

Unlike most of Witherspoon's best work, Blonde was released by a studio that felt like spending more than $1.98 to promote it and came in a summer when audiences were desperate for a laugh. It could gross $60 million--a solid hit for an inexpensive film. Not that she cares very much about such matters. She seems really to mean it when she says she loves "doing small independent films, where you think, 'That's such an original voice.' I would never give up those opportunities. I don't care how much money people throw at me."

One suspects she will not for long surrender to the kind of simple adorability she demonstrates in Blonde. Her essence is tougher, maybe more driven. Her mother used to call her "my little Type A personality," a phrase Witherspoon borrowed to name her production company. She's a notorious spur to her films' writers; she helped turn Blonde into something resembling the female-empowerment comedy Private Benjamin. That intensity carries over to the set. Says Blonde co-producer Marc Platt: "Whether it was Take 2 or Take 7, she'd be focused as if there was no one else on the set--mouthing the words, in character, to make sure she had it just the way she wanted it. She had to consume the character."