Reese takes on the drug industry in 'Pharm Girl'

By Sarah Sluis

The latest addition to Reese Witherspoon's development slate, Pharm Girl, sounds like a clever rehash of Legally Blonde, switching out one profession for the other and upping the character's age to match Witherspoon's. Given the success of the sorority girl-turned-lawyer tale, repetition's not necessarily a bad thing.

The comedy will follow Witherspoon's character after she is hired to work for a "pharma powerhouse." As she is promoted within and becomes more visible, she is exposed to the dark side of the industry. In Election and Legally Blonde, Witherspoon excelled at playing characters who pursue a goal that we, as an audience, know will result in a big crash later on. She makes her characters entirely believable and even empathetic. They're driven by their sense of idealism (say, when she played an abstinence advocate in Cruel Intentions), but she does such a good job of showing us the character's pure motivation, we can't help but respect their allegiance to class presidency/abstinence/the color pink, and we're with them even after they fall.

The writers of Bad Santa, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, plan to write and potentially co-direct the project. In both Bad Santa and Legally Blonde, the characters must step up, not subsume, their quirky personalities to succeed, so I imagine that Witherspoon will have to go back to her down-home idealist pharma roots to set things right with the world. I can't think of a better team of writers to replicate the wacky comedy of Legally Blonde, in which Witherspoon was able to believably save the day in the courtroom due to her knowledge of perming techniques. The writers could also help Witherspoon rough up her image a bit. Bad Santa was a truly shocking, vulgar, not-for-everyone comedy. That willingness to go to the edge, paired with an actress so good at making people like her, could lead to some unpredictable, fresh jokes.

On the other hand, the success of A-List-free The Hangover over star-driven Land of the Lost should lend some caution to the production. Similar ensemble romantic comedies like He's Just Not That Into You and Love, Actually have an aura of freshness that's more appealing than single-romance, one-star tales like My Life in Ruins. Just today, Cinematical wrote an article asking, "Is the star system dead?", and the sense that stars cannot carry project after project of the same old should be a nagging worry in producers' minds.