Down With Love

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Down With Love, Peyton Reed's send-up homage of 1960s sex comedies, is this season's confectionery cousin to last year's Far From Heaven. Like its forerunner, it takes as its starting point a Rock Hudson staple (this time with Doris Day instead of Jane Wyman), paints it in gorgeous vibrant colors and designs (here pinks and pastels and New York flash in place of the rich burnt orange hues of solemn midwest suburbia), and dabs it with pomo self-consciousness that it mistakes for heightened sophistication.

Renée Zellweger plays Barbara Novak, a fresh-faced new-age Cosmo girl avant la lettre who's written the manifesto to liberate women from the ties that bind. Her theory: women who give in to love give up their sense of self. Her solution: give up on love and get your senses satisfied instead. Her book, like the film, is titled "Down With Love." It is, in essence, a turnabout is fair lady echo of 'enry 'iggins' own " Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?"

Catcher Block is the man in question -- ladies' man, man's man,
man about town and Hefner-inspired lead journalist/interviewer at a top men's magazine. Played by Ewan McGregor, Zellweger's equivalent in the not-quite-musical musical star department, attempting the Cary Grant version of that Hudson model, Catcher Block is Barbara Novak's nemesis: a male chauvinist pig in the city to her babe. The year is someone's idea of 1962.

Barbara's book is a big hit; women around the world discover that mixing sex, self-reliance and chocolate makes for a pretty heady cocktail (better than the Pill!), while their husbands, boyfriends and bosses rue the day they started seeing pink.

Barbara's sidekick editor (Sarah Paulson channeling Lauren Bacall and Eve Arden), chain-smoking at the height of fashion, works out a deal with Catch's boss (David Hyde Pierce doing an impeccable Tony Randall, and stealing every scene he's in) to get his top writer and her top author together for a cover story. But with a nod to the Helen Gurley Brown-inspired opus Sex and the Single Girl, the scheduled interview between them is sidelined for a game of misleading identities. Catch puts on an accent borrowed from Pillow Talk's courtly Rex Stetson and a pair of glasses nicked from Hudson's sexually dysfunctional scientist in Lover Come Back, and pretends to be a guileless Texan astronaut resisting Barbara's eagerness to rush him to the launch pad. His goal: to expose her. To dupe her into admitting to the bastions of women who follow her what all women know all men know: there is no such thing as a free lunge.

Hilarity does not ensue. Smart and sassy becomes smarmy and crass at the touch of the middlebrow. Austin Powers-type regression into the uber-obvious takes nearly all the fun out of the split-screen Pillow Talk parody, and the wink-wink of sly innuendo is replaced by sophomoric allusion (a misheard conversation about socks and garters -- the film's lowest point of humor -- would embarrass Adam Sandler).

When the unsettlingly beautiful Rock Hudson and the impossibly virginal Doris Day shared fume and frustration in their prolonged comedic foreplay, there was a hint of adultness about it. Not seriousness, not subtlety, but fine-line sublimation with a sensual twist -- their mock-erotic two-step around the Code's proscriptions was naughtily buoyant with implausible deniability. The audience was allowed to get it long before the leads got to, and the anticipation of their catching up was good for us, too.

Zellweger and McGregor, alas, lack the sizzle and the style of the originals -- and there's not an ounce of chemistry between them.  The unanswered temptations don't seem to tickle them or us. Their New York is spacious and grand, neatly designed (with retractable moon), and a bit more convenient (Grand Central Station is across the street from the UN Plaza), and their wardrobes utterly divine, but the dialogue by The Nanny writers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake has a certain familiar whine to it. The ending is still more grating than that -- more retrogressive than retrospective.

By the time the credits grace the screen on this film, even love has
lost its appeal.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene