Down With Love (DVD)
Special Edition
APPROX. 102 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2003 - MPA RATING: PG-13
" Like the old films it mimics, Down With Love plays with sexual double entendres but never, ever shows any hints of actual sex.
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When is an old-fashioned 1960's style romantic comedy not an old-fashioned 1960's style romantic comedy? When it's made in 2003 and stars Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, naturally.
"Down With Love" is a cute, bubbly, at times overzealous, but generally charming homage to those old Doris Day-Rock Hudson films like "Send Me No Flowers," "Pillow Talk," and "Lover Come Back." However, unlike the Austin Powers flicks, which attempt to spoof and ridicule the sixties' style and culture, "Down With Love" offers rather fondly to duplicate them, although with an updated twenty-first century sensibility. In other words, there is no winking at the audience; the humor and playfulness are inherent in the old-fashioned script rather than relying on send-ups of another era. Most of the time the film's affectionate gimmick works. When it doesn't, it's because it's trying too hard. Note, though, that without a knowledge of the old movies it's echoing, a viewer may mistake "Down With Love" as simply a boring house wreck.
The film is set in 1962, and everything about it from the opening credits to the closing theme music evokes the spirit of lightweight sixties' filmmaking. One will not only see the Day-Hudson references throughout but things like Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" (1959, close enough) as well, and "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Garish colors, split screens, beehive hairdos, horn-rimmed glasses, they're all here, but, again, not to deride them but to remind us of another place and another time, so recent yet so far away.
The film stars two of the screen's biggest current stars, Renee Zellweger ("Chicago," "Bridget Jones's Diary") and Ewan McGregor ("Star Wars," "Moulin Rouge"). She plays Barbara Novak, a young, single, small-town woman from Maine, who has just written a feminist book called "Down With Love," in which she maintains a woman's right to the same kind of independence a man has, especially in terms of a woman's right to enjoy sex without having to worry about love or marriage. McGregor plays Catcher Block, a young, single, swinging playboy, a star journalist for the hip men's magazine "Know." When Catcher learns about Barbara's book, he decides to expose her as a fraud by making her fall in love with him. He's just conceited enough to think he can get away with it. If she does, he plans to write her up as being just like every other woman in the world and just as susceptible to romance.
More important than the plot, though, are the film's atmospheric touches. Think of it: Teeth so white they sparkle, beatniks talking "cool," smoking as the "in" thing to do, Judy Garland and the Ed Sullivan Show, rear-projection motion while two people are in the backseat of a cab, and a fake balcony skyline of New York; things that were all perfectly acceptable to filmgoers everywhere in the sixties, with the battle of the sexes the focal point of almost every comedy, romantic or not. "Fly Me to the Moon" was sung by Astrud Gilbero as well as Frank Sinatra, as we're reminded here, and "Mad" magazine was on top of the world.
Like the old films it mimics, "Down With Love" plays with sexual double entendres but never, ever shows any hints of actual sex. Beds in the sixties' movies were referred to and sat upon, but they were never slept in by two people together. Nevertheless, in milking its gags from the sixties, the present film does things no older film would have done, like use a split-screen telephone conversation to put the two young people in seemingly indelicate positions that border on the lewd. And what do you mean does Catcher succeed in his quest, and do Barbara and Catcher really fall in love? It's still a movie, after all, no matter how much it's updated to provide twists and turns at the end, to promote women's rights, and to fight sexual discrimination.
Even the names are reminiscent of the sixties: "Catcher in the Rye" was the most popular book of the preceding decade and everyone would have heard of it; Kim Novak was a popular actress of the day. Then, to ensure we get the flavor of the times, the ageless Tony Randall shows up as the head of the publishing company that issues Barbara's book. (For the uninformed, Randall was the co-star in most of the Day-Hudson films.) What's more, TV's David Hyde Pierce ("Frasier") plays a character much like Randall's old movie persona--a nervous, insecure, straight-arrow magazine editor.
