Down
with Love
Reviewed by Carla Freccero
Down with Love is a strange tribute to Doris Day and Rock Hudson
romantic comedies like Lover Come Back and Pillow Talk, complete
with the split screen telephone conversations and a leading
man whose sexuality is ever in question. Renée Zellwegger,
having been typecast as successfully retro since Chicago, plays
Barbara Novak, author of a book, Down with Love, designed to
liberate women from the thrall of men. Ewan McGregor-also a
meta-musical star, plays Catcher Block, handsome, hip, "ladies'
man, man's man, man about town," lead story writer for
the influential men's magazine Know.
The secondary characters are Novak's editor, Vicki, played by
Sarah Paulson, the only female editor at her publishing company,
and Peter MacMannus, played by David Hyde Pierce, the owner/editor
of Know. In an elaborate series of twists and turns, the independent
feminist yearns for marriage and domesticity, while the playboy
longs to settle down, each transformative desire having something
to do with the other.
The pseudo-technicolor, the costumes, music, cars and fake New
York City backdrop in this movie-supposedly set in 1962-are
great, glaringly "faux" tributes to the era. The acting,
however, tries to imitate the stilted style of Chicago or Moulin
Rouge or Ozon's Eight Women, and it just doesn't quite work.
You never know whether it's because they can't act or whether
they are doing it on purpose. Fans of Doris Day/Rock Hudson
romantic comedies loved the accidental mishaps and the repressed
but-to postmodern viewers anyway-thoroughly obvious unconscious
sexual dynamics of the films.
Down with Love, in the tradition of all-knowing, cynical, 21st
century postmodernism, shouts all its double entendres and continually
draws attention to the imagined gap between an innocent, repressed
era and its repetition in 2003. It quotes Pillow Talk, it makes
the homosexual subtexts explicit, and it imports a very recent
corporate feminism as the alternative to the career girl/marriage
trajectory. And yet, with all these knowing nods and winks,
Down with Love suggests that really, deep down, now that we've
emerged out the other side of these last 30 years of social
change, we still really want mostly the same things-except that
the couple wants a corporation instead of a kid. So with all
its posturing about being smarter, Down with Love comes across
as somewhat less aware of its own motives than those 60s
movies were.
In short, it's hard to tell whether this movie is a parody of
the romantic comedy of the 60s or a celebratory tribute-there
are moments of good satire, but they get a little dazed and
confused by the rest of the plot. Down with Love waivers between
the two, achieving neither, nor a happy combination of both.
Instead the result is awkward, confusing and, narrative-wise,
badly patched together, since we have to get a whole long chunk
of the plot explained to us by Zelwegger's monologue near the
end of the film. I wish I could say the movie's pure fluff and
you should just go see it for fun. But the constant straining
it does to exaggerate its retro-imitation keeps hinting that
all this must mean something-and yet, somehow, it never quite
does.
Looking for trouble at the movies, for KUSP and the film gang,
this is
Carla Freccero.
