Alexis Bledel becomes the working girl in 'Post Grad'

Working girls in the movies have always faced “the choice” – the guy or the career?

It might not be politically correct in the 2009 world of multi-liberations, but still the working girl tends to choose the guy over the career. From Rosalind Russell (the classic movie working girl who is wary about warming up to a mere man) to Alexis Bledel (the doe-eyed TV actress making her starring debut today in “Post Grad”), Hollywood working girls have been pictured as overly organized, somewhat frigid types.

To keep the drama clear, they must either (a) warm up to men and play the game of cared-for wife who sits at home, looks at soap operas and eats chocolate bon-bons or (b) train men to accept them as competitors who are also worthy of love. (Of course, there are the women who get the loser men, but that’s another kind of movie.) 

Katharine Hepburn, who often played career women but eventually softened to Spencer Tracy, once said, “I don’t care what they say, it is impossible to have it both ways. You simply can NOT have both.” In real life, Hepburn chose the career. 

In movies from the age of Roz and Kate, the brass ring was marriage. Today, the working girl, when she picks love over career, gets to share the rent or the mortgage or simply have a monogamous relationship. In either case, most audiences still see it as a happy ending. However, our heroine in “Post Grad,” opening today in local theaters, is just getting started in her career. It’s a little early to settle down.

Bledel’s character, Ryden Malby, is a nice, somewhat driven  college grad who hits the job market – and bounces back. She winds up sleeping on the couch at her parents’ home. Because this is a working-girl romantic comedy, at least two hunks vie for her attention while she tries to get her career started. 

Ryden did well enough in high school to get a college scholarship. With her degree, she gets a dream job with a good publishing house and a loft apartment in the big city. But her job is stolen by the office’s resident back-stabber, Jessica (played by Catherine Reitman). There’s one in every office, according to the movies.

Ryden is stuck back with her stubborn father (Michael Keaton) and overly thrifty mother (Jane Lynch) as well as a grandmother (Carol Burnett) who is politically incorrect in every way. Ryden has a best friend – a guy, played by Zach Gilford, a quarterback on TV’s “Friday Night Lights.” She’s never thought of him in any sexual way. Plus, there’s a hunky, ultra-hot next-door neighbor who also happens to be rich.  

Bledel has stunning blue eyes, but she’s so thin and shy that she looks as if she might fade away in front of our very eyes. She’s  not the slutty sort of teen idol but the kind you’d take over to meet Mom.

“Role model?” she pondered as she sat at the Casa del Mar hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., the other day. “Well, I’m looking for a role model. I hardly think I could be one. I’m not as much a girly girl as you think. I like to play soccer and ride my bicycle all over Los Angeles, and, don’t forget, I had that role in 'Sin City.’ That’s not the usual kind of role I get, though.”

In “Sin City” she played a rowdy prostitute, but she concedes that no one has offered her a similar role since. The 27-year-old got into acting in the first place back in Houston when her parents encouraged her to try community theater as a way of getting over her shyness. In high school, she had modeling jobs in New York during the summer. She dropped out of NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts to take the part of the daughter of a free spirit in “Gilmore Girls.” The job lasted seven years.

Her movie breakthrough came in 2005 with “Sin City” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” which did only OK at the box office but took off on DVD at home. A sequel followed.

Sounds more like a working girl than a romantic, but faced with the choice – guy or career – she coyly says, “I’ll take people over career any time. I never thought I’d be working this hard this early in life, but I always expected to work. I’m from that kind of family, but in TV, I’m at work at 6 a.m. On Fridays, when we wrap up the show, I was sometimes there until 6 a.m. the next day. And I’m not a morning person. Movies are more reasonable. The hours are much better.”

Since her father is Argentinian and her mother is Mexican, Spanish is her first language. She didn’t learn English until she began attending school.

“Post Grad” aspires, maybe, to be something of a female “The Graduate.” The screenwriter, Kelly Fremon, knows what she’s writing about. A University of Southern California graduate in English, she found herself back, as she puts it, “in my own room with a 'Welcome Home’ sign on the wall. No jobs available.” She eventually got a 9-to-5 desk job but wrote this script at night. Producer Ivan Reitman saw it, and now she’s a working woman in her preferred, imaginative atmosphere.  

Bledel said she is very different from the girl she plays. “She’s a planner. She makes lists. She organizes. I don’t do any of that. In this business, I don’t think you can plan. It’s best to be open to what comes your way, and don’t worry about what doesn’t.”

As for her own future, she’s keeping all options open.

Her answer is laughably succinct: “My future?” She thinks, and then adds: “Some kind of womanhood.”

Mal Vincent , (757) 446-2347 mal.vincent@pilotonline.com.