Freeway (1996)

Director: Matthew Bright

Cast: Kiefer Sutherland, Reese Witherspoon, Wolfgang Bodison, Dan Hedaya

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Can a film be trash and well-crafted? With solid, unflinching performances from Sutherland and Witherspoon here, I think it can be. Witherspoon opens up with a performance that tells the movie-watching world she’s capable of almost anything, and appears to be taking it on faith that she will be allowed to be—as time goes on—packaged as the nice lady her image suggests. Sutherland—both before and after this film—always strikes me as an actor who was more concerned with his image than the material at hand*, but here he’s willing to play irretrievably vile from the word go, before his face winds up matching his personality.

The real strength of the film, however, lies in its ability to surprise without confusing. In the early minutes of the film, one gets a sense of where this story is going.

That isn’t where the story is going.

Once Sutherland picks up Witherspoon, I have a completely different idea of where this story will go. With a monster getting more than he bargained for with his latest prey, the two characters would proceed to make each other’s lives a greater hell until the sun comes up, and one of them finally kills the other.

That isn’t where the story is going, either.

That cat-and-mouse game consistently eschews an easy answer as to who the cat is in this scenario, and never fails to keep one mortified and engaged in what might happen next. This might lead some to argue that there’s a tone problem here, with the story flitting between different scenarios to keep its runtime up, but all of these turns feel like they are of a piece with one another.

If you need another level of endorsement of the film, here it is: This was programmed in a late-night movie marathon, run in conjunction with Vinegar Syndrome, that Criterion Edition of Trash, and this was the only title from the night’s offerings that I bought to have for my own.

*For reasons even I can’t remember, I’ve been watching Designated Survivor recently and have been finding it to be something of a chore.

Legally Blonde (2001)

Director: Robert Luketic

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Matthew Davis

Have I Seen it Before: I think so? Like, somewhere in last twenty years I would have to have seen it, right?

Did I Like It: Look, let’s not mince words. This is another one of those instances where Lora wanted to watch something, and I was amenable, mainly because I had a new set of Lego with which to tinker. I promised when I began these reviews that as long as I didn’t fall asleep through the screening, I would go ahead and write a review.

So, here we are.

The above seems to indicate I want to dismiss the film, and that’s not entirely true. This is not cosmetic snobbishness. I’d feel this way about any movie where the protagonist bravely decides to go to law school. I’m never going to buy into that scenario. To quote Elle Woods (Witherspoon), “You’ve got the wrong girl.”

Sure, it’s a slight comedy with not a lot of ambition written into the idea. The plot is cookie cutter to the point where it feels like a pre-written chapter in a screenwriting book that people buy to avoid, you know, actually writing... As I write this, my only reason for suspecting that I have seen the film before was that I saw the perm-based resolution of the plot coming a mile away.

At the same time, it manages to succeed at what it strives for far more than it’s normally given credit. It would be so easy for Elle Woods to be an absolute nightmare of a person, rendering her struggles cathartic. Yet, the film deftly avoids making her awful. She’s never judgmental, she always helps people around her, and a key to the success of the film, she largely earns her status as an underdog, despite her absolutely pure privilege. Some of that is probably Witherspoon’s performance, but more than a little bit of it has to be that screenplay which doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel.