Down With Love Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)May 19th, 2003
DOWN WITH LOVE
Grade: B
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
20th Century Fox/Fox 2000 & Regency
Directed by: Peyton Reed
Written by: Eve Ahlert, Dennis Drake
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson, Tony Randall
Screened at: Loews 34th St., NYC, 5/17/03
While "Far From Heaven" a serious film that does a fine job of recreating American life and times of the 1950s, satirizing the glossy romantic comedies of the fifties and sixties today is about as difficult as shooting ducks in a barrel. In "Down With Love," Peyton Reed takes aim with a shotgun at a metaphoric side of a barn in sending up (while at the same time paying homage to) the ditzy movies that paired playboy-handsome Rock Hudson with virginal girl-next-door Doris Day. Yet there's a twist in Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake's screenplay since the woman who both resembles and stands in for Ms. Day performs in the role of a woman liberated before her time, one who believes that to develop equality between the sexes, women should avoid love with its attendant marriage and suburban picket fences and instead have casual sex and high-profile careers.
With scenic designs and costumes that might be the envy of John Waters and with enough pastel pink to fit right into a Reese Witherspoon pic, Reed posits a swinging bachelor playboy against a woman who is his match in an on-again, off- again romance whose conclusion is as predictable as that of "Maid in Manhattan," a tale told against a New York skyline with a fake moon set against the backdrop of the island's
skyscrapers.
Set in 1962 during the Kennedy administration, not long before the Vietnam War would evoke a change in America's political, social and cultural mores, "Down With Love" opens on first-time author Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger), whose non- fiction tome "Down With Love" would have an effect on American women not unlike that which Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" had on the sexes in ancient Greece. Novak's point is that marriage keeps women from equality as they become imprisoned behind their white picket fences while their men enjoy satisfying careers in the big city. She urges women to become more like men, to be sexually liberated and break through the glass ceiling that prevents them from careers other than nursing, teaching and home-making. When playboy Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a magazine editor working for Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce), sees that her book violates his own freewheeling code of behavior, he is determined to expose her as a hypocrite, taking on a new identity as a hick astronaut to win her love and force her to eschew her own thesis.
Though the film plays out in the style of the 50's and early 60's Hudson-Day offerings like "Pillow Talk" (1962), Reed often exaggerates, particularly when he introduces elements that would never be allowed a half-century ago. For example, while "Pillow Talk" uses the split screen technique to illustrate home life when many telephone users had to accept party lines, he manipulates Catcher and Barbara into positions in their separate quarters to imply that they are having sex when, in fact, they are miles apart. In fact words like "sex" and "pregnant" were scarcely de rigeuer at that time. Exaggerations notwithstanding, "Down With Love" offers a delightful subplot which often steals center screen from the principals. Peter McMannus, a prissy editor who resembles the Tony Randall character from "The Odd Couple," conducts a rocky romance with Novak's editor, Vicki Hiller (winningly played by Sarah Paulson.
"Down With Love" is enough fun to subvert a review of "Pillow Talk" by D. Fienberg which appears on epinions.com: "We don't really do romantic pairings like Doris and Rock anymore. We don't have anything close. It's just too hard to get the big male stars and the big female stars to pair up on screen, and when they do pair up, we find out just how hard it is to do proper romantic comedy. Till then, we can just revisit the old treasures like "Pillow Talk."
Rated PG-13. 94 minutes. Copyright 2003 by Harvey Karten at [email protected]
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
