'The House Bunny': Anna Faris adds a touch of class to misfit sorority
Shelley Darlingson (Anna Faris) is not particularly bright. She lacks Juno Mac-Guff’s quick wit, and unlike Elle Woods has no brilliant legal mind beneath her well-coiffed hair. But she’s plucky, patient and bighearted, a charming outlier to the recent crop of smart-girl protagonists in film.
"THE HOUSE BUNNY"
Three stars
STARRING: Anna Faris, Colin Hanks and Hugh Hefner as himself
DIRECTOR: Fred Wolf
RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes
RATING: PG-13 for sex-related humor, partial nudity and brief strong language.
THE LOWDOWN: An exiled Playboy Bunny must help a sorority save its home, while working to win the heart of a handsome do-gooder.
As a Playboy Bunny, she spends her days lounging by the pool with Hef, practicing yoga and shopping for brightly colored outfits more revealing than most swimsuits. Then she is evicted from the mansion on the morning after her 27th birthday, because “27 [is] 59 in Bunny years.”
Abandoned on an orphanage doorstep as an infant, Shelley has always wanted a family, so she charms her way into a job as house mother for a failing sorority. Zeta Alpha Zeta has seven sisters, in effect Nerdy, Shorty, Shy, Pregnant, Manly, Anti-social and Backbrace. Unless they can attract 30 pledges by the end of rush period, they’ll lose their charter and house. Their new Snow White teaches them how to flirt and “skimpify” their wardrobes — superficial popularity being the field in which she holds a doctorate. Before you can say “silicone,” the Zetas are the hottest things on campus, hosting raucous parties and burying their distinct personalities under fake eyelashes and hair extensions.
“Bunny” is a house built on cliche: A rival sorority conspires to destroy the Zetas, newfound popularity temporarily corrupts, and Nerdy is hot without her glasses. The morals are also tried and true: Be yourself, families come in all shapes and sizes, beauty is only skin deep. For a film like this to exceed the sum of its parts, the main character must be endearing, and she is. Like Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde,” Faris subverts our perception of a party girl. She shows the audience a woman graduating from pampered daughter to brave foster mother, a sex object in unfamiliar territory when she discovers that people value her personality.
Films like “The Golden Compass” and “Mean Girls” provide valuable examples of intelligent young women, but “The House Bunny” possesses a heroine whose primary virtues are altruism and a non-judgmental attitude. She’s a bubblier version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, who loved throwing parties and “would never say of anyone that they were this or they were that.” She also accompanies her girls to class and improves her vocabulary, so that humorous mixed metaphors are replaced by laughably unorthodox, but correct, uses of words such as “germane” and “philanthropy.” Contrary to the advice she has given Nerdy, some men like brainy women: Oliver (Colin Hanks) falls for Shelley when she volunteers at the nursing home he operates, but she nearly derails their romance by attempting to seduce him with her old tricks, then trying to remake herself as a nerd. She’ll have to peel back layers she never knew she had to save the Zetas and get her man.
Like its winning heroine, this superficially predictable movie turns out to be more heart and brains than the assets that earned Shelley a room in the Playboy mansion.•
