"Down With Love"

This pitch-perfect imitation of a Rock Hudson-Doris Day nonsex comedy features Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor and a passel of visual delights. But why should we care?

By Stephanie Zacharek

May 16, 2003 | "Down With Love" is an aggressive trifle. Right from its kickoff, an explosively colorful animated credit sequence, the movie begs us to fall in love with it.

There's a good chance we might have. But the fatal flaw of "Down With Love," a note-for-note mimicry of early-'60s Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies like "Pillow Talk" and "Lover Come Back," is that in mining what's kitschily amusing about those movies, it also re-creates far too faithfully everything that's unbearable about them. For every amusingly saucy double-entendre ("I've got her surrounded, and it won't take a surprise attack to enter her tepee!"), there's also a strangling surfeit of garish jokes that wink at the differences between the sexes. Those gags were squaresville even in the early '60s, and repeating them so exhaustively, even in this allegedly fresh context, doesn't make them funnier -- it simply makes the air around them feel stale.

"Down With Love" (which was shot, with gusto, by Jeff Cronenweth) is all done up in the Technicolor brightness of the originals, but, as with those earlier movies, its vivacious look seems to be covering up something -- as if color were a kind of Glade air freshener that could be sprayed liberally to mask anything that's simply old and tired.

Director Peyton Reed previously brought us the invigorating cheerleader satire "Bring It On," and I'd have thought that if anybody could make this type of material work (the script is by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake), he could. But "Down With Love" is grandly frustrating -- frustrating because so much of it is genuinely bright and funny, and because everyone involved in the movie obviously paid close attention to its clever details. (In one of my favorite moments, David Hyde Pierce, as the lead character's sidekick, waves an unopened vermouth bottle over the martini he's mixing -- a variation on the classic Winston Churchill recipe, which involved simply bowing in the direction of France.)

In fact, most of what I found so exhausting about "Down With Love" were my own efforts to like it, not least because it features two actors who, I think, have it in them to double-handedly revivify the genre of romantic comedy. Renée Zellweger is Barbara Novak, a pint-size cutie who has just arrived in New York City (from her home in Maine) to promote her new book, called, naturally enough, "Down With Love." It's a manifesto of womanly independence that seems to be a cross between Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" and Helen Gurley Brown's "Sex and the Single Girl."

Novak urges women to enjoy sex as men do, without emotional entanglement, and to dampen their craving for love by eating lots of chocolate instead. Ewan McGregor is Catcher Block, a star magazine writer and notorious playboy (his trail of babes is represented by a succession of luscious airline hostesses) who sets out to undermine Novak by disguising himself as an aw-shucks astronaut in order to make her fall in love with him.

But any chemistry McGregor and Zellweger might have had is plowed under by the movie's aggressive faithfulness to its inspiration. In fact, the actors play into the movie's scheme all too well: Like Doris and Rock, they're relentlessly stiff and bright -- sometimes they look as if they're moving like Puppetoons, not people. And when they finally do fall into each other's arms, as of course they must, the gleaming veneer of spoofery never cracks -- we can applaud their exactitude as actors, and yet we feel next to nothing for their characters.

Zellweger and McGregor are perfectly enjoyable to watch, particularly as they've been dressed by costume designer Daniel Orlandi. McGregor appears in a succession of dinner jackets and sport coats (not to mention boxer shorts, which he plays for laughs, even though they're oddly sexy) that amplify his already prodigious star quality -- his outfits seem to have been lifted straight from the box of Leading Man Colorforms, and he plays into them and off them wonderfully. (In one sequence, he stands curbside in a black-and-white checked jacket, just as one of those old yellow Checker taxicabs pulls up, its checkerboard stripe echoing the pattern of his coat. It's a superb example of how a cinematographer, a costumer and a production designer -- in this case, Andrew Laws -- can put their heads together to give one brief moment a gloriously satisfying click.)

Next Page: Renee Zellweger, packed into more delicious dress-up outfits than you can shake a Barbie case at

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