Steel Behind the Smile

Monday, Aug. 06, 2001 By RICHARD SCHICKEL
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Witherspoon, who is married to the illegally cute actor Ryan Philippe (her co-star in 1999's Cruel Intentions) and has a two-year-old daughter, says her secret ambition is to be an anthropologist. She says she did some fieldwork along those lines by hanging out with U.S.C. sorority girls to prepare for this role. But she knows more about young American bitchiness than she's telling--or showing--in Blonde. Sometimes, as in Election or the brilliant Pleasantville, in which she was a modern teen time-warped back to the bland, sitcom '50s, her wide-set blue eyes turn cold with contempt for square adulthood. Or squinch up in shrewd calculation of how to use (or abuse) the cluelessness of grownups.

She has the wit to keep the hard-edged observations in her performances distanced by satire. But a sharp viewer can find them. Even in Legally Blonde, which spins her screen character so genially, a slight chill invades the watcher--all that shrewdness, all that drive devoted to winning not particularly well-considered gains.

The actress's goals are more carefully considered. She has finished a new film version of The Importance of Being Earnest in which she plays Cecily Cardew, whose romantic cleverness is of a variety more purring than Witherspoon has yet played. Also looming is an action picture based on the old Honey West private-eye books.

In the meantime, she's considering improving her L.A. digs. "There's this whole fallacy that because you're in the movies, you make a load of money," Witherspoon says. "You really don't." Maybe not yet. But after Blonde opened big, she said to her husband, "Ryan, this might be it. We might finally get air-conditioning." And, one imagines, a whole lot more.

--Reported by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles