Rules of attraction: Alice Lovejoy gets down with love

Film Comment, May-June, 2003 by Alice Lovejoy

Midway through Peyton Reed's Down With Love, womanizing star journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) and best-selling author Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger) are dressing, in their respective homes, for a rendezvous with each other. Zellweger, in her bath and airy pink-and-white dressing room, and McGregor, in front of his fit-for-convenience armoire, preen and prance to alternate versions of "Fly Me to the Moon." For Zellweger, it's Astrud Gilberto's sultry suggestion of a celestial voyage, and for McGregor, Sinatra's swaggering demand for something less lofty. In these wordless few moments, Reed reduces Down With Love to its essence, a simple split between softness and brashness, romance and calculation. They might be listening to the same song, but this man and woman are hearing two different pieces of music.

There's a lot of dressing up in this movie, a lot of role-playing. Down With Love's Sixties New York is an elaborate stage, decorated with paper moons and movie-lot building facades, a New York in which you can cross the street at Grand Central and find yourself in front of the U.N. A place, as it proclaims itself to be in the film's first shot, to which dreamers come to realize their dreams, to launch their careers--or perhaps more accurately, to launch themselves. It's an actor's New York, pliable in its geography and boundless in its opportunities.

The movie itself is playing a part--it's an homage to any number of Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies from the early Sixties, and specifically a rethinking of the 1959 Pillow Talk (with a nod to James Bond). Doris Day's interior decorator is refashioned into Zellweger's Barbara, a "girl from Maine who wrote a book and came to New York." This book, the eponymous Down With Love, is a do-it-yourself liberation guide for women, an anti-Rules of sorts. The concept? By freeing themselves from the demands of love and marriage (and engaging only in no-strings "sex a la carte"), women will achieve equality. (In the early stages of the program, chocolate is prescribed as a substitute for sex.) Rock Hudson's lothario songwriter, with whom Day shares a party line (!!), becomes McGregor's Catcher, "ladies' man, man's man, man about town." Catcher is assigned to debunk Barbara's book for men's magazine KNOW by his boss and best friend, played by David Hyde Pierce in the Tony Randall role (Randall himself has a cameo as Zellweger's published. In Pillow Talk, Day and Hudson feud over the use of the aforementioned party line; when they meet, Hudson realizes the girl on the other end of the phone is a catch, and goes undercover as a (possibly gay) well-mannered Southerner in order to get her into the sack. Catcher's intentions are somewhat more malicious. He rejects the assignment--until he catches sight of Barbara, at which point he realizes that by posing as naive Southern astronaut "Zip Martin," he can seduce her and in the process expose her as a marriage-crazy, traditional, nonliberated woman. Whew.

Down With Love hinges on the stylized movement--unifying actors, sets, and direction--that Reed sets up. When everything's in line, it's perfectly in line; when one element is out of line, the movie falls flat. McGregor's version of Rock Hudson's character is Rat Pack cooler than the original, slinking through his scenes, all lady-killing gelled hair and cocked eyebrow. David Hyde Pierce paces, obsesses. Zellweger's Doris Day, on the other hand, is anemic--but as Barbara's editor, Vikki Hiller, Sarah Paulson has spunk, swagger, and an endearing lisp, all of which bring her closer to the Day ideal than Zellweger ever gets. Vikki is the kind of career girl for whom Barbara writes her book, a woman who contends with a boardroom full of men asking her to make coffee "while she's up." Where Zellweger swallows the punch of Day's wide-eyed reaction shots with her trademark squinty-eyed downcast look, Paulson nails them. Where Zellweger seems vulnerable, collapsible, unhappy, Paulson has Day's air of resiliency--without a man we know she, like Day, will be just fine. If David Hyde Pierce is Ewan McGregor's partner in crime, Paulson is Zellweger's better half.

The Sixties lounge aesthetic seems to suit Peyton Reed, whose last film, the deceptively disposable but estimable Bring It On, betrayed a taste for choreographed action in setpieces that seem as much danced as acted--the whole movie plays as if the actors are perpetually on the verge of breaking into song. Ostensibly more naturalistic (inasmuch as a Southern California high school cheerleading movie ever could be), Bring It On channeled its musical tendencies into exuberant, gravity-defying cheer routines. In Down With Love, Reed's been let loose in a mythical era that matches his sensibility (Appearance! Artifice! Set design!). Driving scenes are shot with rear projection. McGregor's "woman-snaring" space-age bachelor pad, like Hudson's, comes complete with couch-side switches that activate the tools of seduction: lights, record player, hidden bar, automatic fold-out bed (more ominously, in Pillow Talk, one of the switches deadbolts the front door). Pillow Talk, whose narrative hinges on the telephone, makes ingenious use of split screens to keep both Day and Hudson in view during their phone calls. Reed reprises this device for Down With Love's phone conversations, but takes considerably more care over the geometry of the frame and its potential for innuendo. Even the film's actors (or is it the characters they play?) are fastidious in their self-presentation (with the exception of Hyde Pierce's character, whose, Randall-esque narcissistic fretting is directed inwards), as if they know they're being watched at all times--and they like it. Zellweger and Paulson enter rooms in tandem, wearing complementary dresses, McGregor dons sunglasses as he swaggers into his office, seemingly putting on a show for his receptionist's benefit. Reed lets his knack for timing spill over to his characters: Paulson emphasizes her line readings with a flick of the hips or a toss of the head; when he parts with Zellweger after their first encounter, McGregor walks away slowly and counts to five, knowing she'll call him back. At its best, the movie plays with the structure of a tango and the swing of a mambo (early on, the two male leads share an impromptu bossa nova); characters enter and exit the screen in sync with each other, allowing a series of near-misses and perfect connections.