Down With Love revisits the romantic comedy of the early '60s, lovingly re-creating its surfaces while gently updating its battle of the sexes.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 15, 2003
[Photo: Twentieth Century Fox]
Move over, darlings -- Rock Hudson and Doris Day, that is. Ewan McGregor’s journalist-playboy, left, and Renee Zellweger’s advice author re-create the romantic look and feel of Pillow Talk in Down With Love.
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Like last year's Far From Heaven, Peyton Reed's Down With Love wants to show what audiences missed a half-century ago, when it seemed as if everybody in America was having sex except people in the movies. Film characters chatted around it, anguished over it, even slipped in double entendres and suggestive glances to let everyone know what was really on their minds.
But they rarely lusted for it openly in the movies, or expected it on a first date, or (shudder) talked about it afterward. Sexuality was undercover and often in separate beds, even for married couples. Fireworks, candles and crackling logs visually subbed for the heat Hollywood couldn't show.
Little wonder that the biggest female box office star of the era was Doris Day, whose rosy battle-of-the-sexes comedies typically revolved around her skill at leading on her leading men.
Down With Love is a cotton candy-colored copy of the movies Day made, especially Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson, an Oscar winner for best screenplay. But Reed and screenwriters Eve Allert and Dennis Drake make nostalgia more topical by focusing on the stuff studios wouldn't allow in 1959: Feminism that would have rankled male sensibilities and a more confident sexuality that would have made everyone blush. The players remain relatively chaste and a wedding is still the ultimate feminine dream, but on her terms, not his.
Sociology aside, Down With Love is a great-looking movie, from Fox's resurrection of the vintage Cinemascope logo at the opening, to its bouncy end-credits music video. The movie's release on the same weekend as The Matrix Reloaded is brilliant counterprogramming; a light and meticulously frivolous choice for moviegoers, and a throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood style while the art form hurtles forward digitally.
Renee Zellweger (Chicago) takes the Day role as Barbara Novak, a virginal farmer's daughter from the Midwest moving to Manhattan in 1962 when her feminist manifesto, Down With Love, is published. Her ideas aren't radical by 21st century standards, so the humor initially springs from flummoxed male executives pushing her off to the side. Sarah Paulson plays Barbara's editor and fashion accomplice Vikki Hiller, a chip off the Paula Prentiss block of second bananas.
Vikki figures the only way to make Barbara's book a best seller is through an Ed Sullivan Show appearance. Never mind that Sullivan didn't do books and certainly wouldn't have for this one. In true Hollywood fashion - that is to say, totally unbelievable - Ed gives them a break, housewives get hooked on the book and husbands across America are ready for divorce.
The phenomenon and Barbara's looks grab the attention of man-about-town Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a magazine reporter when he doesn't have a stewardess (hey, it's 1962) on his arm. Catch blew off Barbara when he thought she was a spinster. She never met him, won't speak to him and therefore falls for the old assumed identity routine when Catcher adopts a Southern accent as dashing astronaut Zip Martin. Catcher wants Barbara to fall head over heels, defying her philosophy and ruining the book, making households "normal" again.
Neither one expects to fall in love with the other. If you don't, maybe The Matrix Reloaded isn't a bad choice.
The plot of Down With Love isn't as impressive as the loving attention Reed and his designers apply to re-creating the glossy artifice of Day's comedies. Every entrance for Barbara and Vikki is a fashion show, everything Catch does displays an impossible savoir faire. Old New York becomes a supporting character with blue-screen backgrounds of traffic for the classic two-shot of characters driving and talking. The skyline is usually a painting, a masterpiece first glimpsed through the clouds as if the heavens came down to visit. This movie is as authentically detailed as Far From Heaven, but on the other end of the color spectrum, all sunny pastels and then-modern architecture.
Inspired by their surroundings, the actors play their retro-roles to the hilt. Zellweger doesn't channel Day the way she did Shirley MacLaine in Chicago, opting for a more playfully seductive tone. But they share the same gumption, two women making it in a man's world with sex appeal matching their minds. Barbara simply has the advantage of time, allowing her to be bolder as she bucks the system.
McGregor breezes through his role with a constant twinkle in his eye, obviously having fun with the Hefner aspects of Catch's life. Paulson, a former Tampa resident whom I've never seen before, is a true find, an elegant ally in Barbara's crusade with crack comic timing.
The standout, however, is David Hyde Pierce as Peter MacMannus, Catch's editor, best friend, polar opposite and Vikki's would-be lover. In short, he's the Tony Randall character and a magnificent facsimile at that. I never considered Randall's influence on Pierce's Frasier role as Niles Crane, but here it is. Take away Niles' Ivy League accent, add a few more neuroses and we have Peter, a fussy, lovelorn support system.
There was always a question of whether Randall's characters in these affairs would have preferred Hudson's company, a gay urban legend documented in the films Rock Hudson's Home Movies and The Celluloid Closet. Reed doesn't shy away from that notion, making it another winking, subversive aspect of this tribute. I'll admit the movie lost my attention when Barbara launches into a one-take explanation of the farce, an exaggeration of Day's last-reel confessions, and the 15 minutes after that are fairly needless.
But Down With Love is still a good time at the movies, nothing original but something we haven't seen in a long time. Whether audiences are satisfied with lightweight naughtiness after how far movies have taken sex remains to be seen.
Down With Love
Grade: B+
Director: Peyton Reed
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson, Rachel Dratch, Tony Randall
