Down With Love Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)May 20th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
DOWN WITH LOVE
Directed by Peyton Reed
98 minutes, rated PG-13
If "Down with Love" does nothing else, it should buff up the luster of Rock Hudson's reputation. And Doris Day's, for that matter. It turns out there was more to all that pillow talk than met the eye. If being an icon was easy, we'd all be doing it.
It is a measure of Hudson's achievement that an actor of Ewan McGregor's ability flounders so palely in his shadow. Hudson, whose legend has come to be dominated by his homosexuality, still generates an easy, joyous masculinity in the movies of his prime. It is not enough, as actors like Clint Walker and Chuck Connors could tell you, to be big and brawny and good looking. Talent and technique are important, but they can't guarantee immortality. And an actor's private life may have little to do with who he is on screen. Hudson was a Hollywood original, an heir in his way to the mantle of cinematic divinity that clung to the likes of Cooper, Wayne, and Grant. McGregor, without question, has many times his acting talent; but when it comes to playing Rock Hudson, there are some challenges better left unmet.
The occasion for this effrontery is "Down with Love", a pastiche/lampoon of the virginity-tickling battles of the sexes that made Rock and Doris household words. In the footsteps, if not the spirit, of Todd Haynes's "Far From Heaven", director Peyton Reed ("Bring It On") has reached back into his parents' generation for his armature. But Haynes was making a straight-faced tribute to an admired genre from the mid-20th century. Reed's approach is equally admiring, but tongue in cheek. The screenplay, by sitcom veterans Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, is full of funny ideas, but you sense the movie must have been a lot more fun to write than it is to see. Genre satire works in Mad Magazine parodies and SNL sketches; it's hard to maintain the lightness over feature length, and soon the gags start hitting the floor with the heavy thud of a trunk being dragged down a long flight of stairs.
Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger) arrives in New York in the spring of 1962 for the launch of her book, a feminist gospel called Down with Love, which preaches that women have the right to the same helpings off life's platter that men do, both in the marketplace and in the bedroom. Her staunch ally is Vikki Hiller (Sara Paulson), who is her editor at the publishing house but still gets sent by the male editors for coffee. Vikki has staged a publicity coup by going into the lion's den and arranging an interview with the lion - Catcher Block (McGregor), the star reporter for male chauvinist magazine Know. Catcher is James Bond without the license to kill, a fisher of babes with a fresh one every time he casts his line. (He specializes in stewardesses, who would almost seem to have the "Down with Love" thing down - recreational sex, a good job with plenty of travel.) It's flint and steel when Barbara and Catcher meet. They hate each other on sight, which can only lead to love.
The filmmakers layer the confection with genre gags. Verbal and visual double-entendres cascade in a dizzy Niagara, but they've been wised up for the times - there's an extended play on words about the length of a man's hose ("Mine stays up all day long") which turns out to be about garterless socks, and the famous split-screen technique that allowed Doris and Rock to share a bed in "Pillow Talk" is updated here to a suggestivity appropriate for the post-Lewinsky era.
The look of the movie is perfect, starting with the period logo and the bouncy graphics of the opening credits. Zellweger sports more pillboxes than the Western Front, and her wardrobe is a riot of patterns and pastels and capes and crinolines and fetching, bottom-hugging provocations. Taxi rides sport rear-screen projection in the cab window, Manhattan has been rearranged for maximum tourist effect, Barbara's apartment ("Oh Vikki, it's adorable!") is a triumph of art direction, Catcher's is a triumph of seduction technology. But a romantic comedy whose best moments are found in its art direction is a romantic comedy headed for Blockbuster.
They've got the supporting players right, with Paulson doing a credible job as Paula Prentiss, and David Hyde Pierce (who admittedly spends much of his professional life on this street) nearly saving the picture with his deft comic timing as Tony Randall (Tony Randall also appears, a distracting sight gag.)
But Ewan and Renee are not Rock and Doris, and they know it. And so they play Rock and Doris playing characters, and that is once removed too many. Zellweger scrunches her face and minces her walk and plows gamely through a plot-explaining monologue the length of a State of the Union address, but there's a knowingness to her performance that can't match the aerodynamics of the original. McGregor, with his hair dyed jet black to match his tuxedo, always seems to be trying too hard to achieve the effortless hunkiness that Hudson radiated like Chernobyl. And the chemistry between these two never combusts. As the old song puts it, they "just fizz like pots of asbestos powder." A fine romance, indeed.
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