Down with Love: Movie & DVD Review (2003)

(Originally published 2003)

The new romantic comedy, “Down with Love,” stars Renee Zellweger as Barbara Novak, a blonde puff of good cheer who leaves the family farm in Maine for the concrete cornrows of New York City.

There, in the film’s Technicolor dreamworld of 1962, she and her hot-to-trot editor, Vikki (Sarah Paulson), plan to publish Barbara’s new book, “Down with Love,” a potent pot of empowerment that--41 years ago--would have generated enough steam to fuel a volcano.
Which it does.

The book, a pre-feminist dictum divided into three steps, outlines how women can become just as successful as men. To do so, Barbara suggests they should forgo romantic love, focus on their careers and fulfill their sexual needs by either eating large amounts of chocolate or by limiting themselves to sex “a la carte.”

You know, as some men do.

Before you can say “make your own damn dinner,” the book has made Barbara a star. Soon, she’s everywhere, the biggest thing since the pill, a fact that catches the eye of Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a roguish magazine writer who, with the encouragement of his nebbish editor, Peter (David Hyde Pierce), tries to fool Barbara into falling in love with him so he can expose her as a down-and-out fraud.

As directed by Peyton Reed (“Bring It On”) from a script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, “Down with Love” wants more than anything to be as fluffy as the down filling in Michael Gordon’s “Pillow Talk,” the 1959 sex comedy that won Doris Day an Academy Award nomination and found her waxing cute with Rock Hudson on remote-controlled sofas that turned into beds.

“Love” features a similarly rigged sofa--and Tony Randall in a cameo--but in spite of straining to match “Pillow’s” breezy success, it only occasionally manages to do so.

Unlike Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven,” which mirrored the films of Douglas Sirk while giving the genre a contemporary lift, and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me if You Can,” which nailed the look and feel of the 1960s, “Love” is self-aware to the point of distraction. It’s a poseur trying to pull off a parody, winking so broadly at itself and at the audience, you fear it might develop a tic.

Complicating matters is the premise--it’s tough to be down with a movie that wants to warm you with deceit. It’s tougher still to like characters maneuvering at every turn to stab each other in the back.

Hudson and Day were able to create a formidable sexual snap not just because they looked good together onscreen, but because both were fighting against something real--the sexual limitations of the times, Hudson’s closeted homosexuality, the sheen of virginal innocence Hollywood demanded from Day. They turned those roadblocks into tools.

Zellweger and McGregor, on the other hand, have only their dimpled cuteness to get them through this particular movie, which you sense, at least from their mugging, that they believe is enough. It isn’t.

Grade: C+