Rules of attraction: Alice Lovejoy gets down with love

Film Comment, May-June, 2003 by Alice Lovejoy

But this concern with appearances isn't just a symptom of Sixties pastiche. Down With Love, like a lot of good comedies, borrows from Shakespeare--character doublings/multiple couples (Catcher/Barbara, Peter/Vikki), headspinning wordplay ("I have no way of knowing how things are now at KNOW. I knew how things were at KNOW before NOW"). But more importantly, the movie works from a Shakespearean notion that love is something that puts you through trials that challenge the very core of your being. Love happens to Shakespeare's characters, whether they like it or not, and it takes them outside themselves, changes them. And so it follows that Barbara Novak, like Rosalind's Ganymede or Viola's Cesario (or Catcher's Zip Martin), is not Barbara Novak. She's not a Down With love Girl. She's one of Catcher's former secretaries, and she's madly in love with him.

In Down With Love's strangest moment, Zellweger delivers a threeminute monologue in which she details how she conspired to snare Catcher (get it?), anticipating every move she would make and each of his responses, leading up to this very moment. And it works: Block asks her to marry him. But the movie stops dead in its tracks when that monologue begins: Reed doesn't move the camera or cut away, and all of the motion, the dancing, the choreographed game of appearances, is trumped by the scene's flatness. It's almost a Brechtian moment. Granted, any number of comedies employ the device of having someone step forward to let us know that it's okay, all of this is planned, we're still in the narrative. But this one's made doubly odd by Reed's choice of Zellweger for this role, an actress who, of late, has seemed to shrink into herself, in an apparent effort to rid herself of her own body. And she acts this scene--in which she demonstrates that she has not only figured out how to win over the man she loves but has written a book that's become an international best-seller and changed gender dynamics worldwide--glumly, almost remorsefully. She swallows her words, looks downward, as though her achievements are nothing more than a burden. The monologue's delivery is so out of place that it's hard to imagine it as a directorial oversight. So why did Reed leave it in? Why not cut to the infinitely more expressive McGregor? Or better, why not cast a different actress--someone like, say, Reese Witherspoon, or an older Kirsten Dunst, who would make the most of three uncut minutes of screen time?

But (to its credit) Reed's perpetual motion machine of a movie unapologetically picks up where it left off. The men and women of Down With Love continue to try to oneup one another, in a perverse progression towards romantic love. And in its final 15 minutes, all the sentiment lurking beneath the film's shag carpets and pillbox hats is hung out to dry. It's heartbreaking to watch a devastated Catcher trying to win Barbara back with an expose of his own unmasking ("Catcher Block Exposed: How Falling in Love with Barbara Novak Made Me a New Man"). "Maybe someday you'll do a piece on how you became someone in between the mousy little brunette Nancy Brown and the ball-busting blonde Barbara Novak," McGregor, wide-blue-eyed and slump-shouldered, tells the impassive Zellweger, swathed in a white turban. (Payoff: she's a redhead.)