What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘Down with Love,’ a Rom-Com Throwback to a Throwback
In 2003, in the midst of a three-for-three run at Oscar nominations and in between Bridget Jones movies, Renée Zellweger appeared in a brightly colored, confectionary romantic comedy opposite Ewan McGregor, himself in the midst of Star Wars sequels and not too far removed from his dashing turn in Moulin Rouge! Financially, Down with Love was not a success. (Movies that made more that year included Biker Boyz and Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star.) But its cult grew among film fans, appreciative of its retro trimmings that paid homage to stylish late 1950s and early 1960s rom-coms like Pillow Talk, and now the movie has made it to the Criterion Channel for their February series on New York love stories – just as a new Bridget Jones movie heads to Peacock for Valentine’s Day.
Why Watch Down with Love Tonight?
Back in 2003, audiences were very much in the mood for a starry rom-com involving magazine-based deception, where a man and a woman pursue professional goals by manipulating each other, but wind up falling in love. That movie was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which, if you squint through the gauzy soft focus, vaguely resembles a classic screwball comedy. But like so many rom-coms of this era, the movie slows down its dialogue, peppers in a bunch of gender-stereotyped truisms, and ups the third-act sentimentality until its screwball bones are all but invisible. That bastardization connected to audiences far more readily than Down with Love or Intolerable Cruelty, two fizzier and vastly funnier screwball homages that followed later in the year – and Down with Love did the worst business of the three.
Granted, Down with Love isn’t quite vintage-style screwball, either. It’s more directly imitating semi-liberated sorta-sex comedies of ’50s and ’60s, like the three films Doris Day and Rock Hudson made together. (Pillow Talk, their first team-up, was one of the biggest hits of 1959.) But Peyton Reed’s winking homage also has some of the speed and sass of screwball, with its 1962 style lending it more leeway on the innuendos – more, too, than most genuine 1959 movies could bear. Renée Zellweger, in one of her best performances, plays Barbara Novak, an authoress who arrives in a gorgeously fake New York City (she steps out of Grand Central and immediately, conspicuously catches a cab across the street… at the U.N. building located half a mile away) to promote her fashionable new women’s-lib book Down with Love, which advocates women focusing on their own needs and embracing casual sex. Men’s magazine writer Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), repeatedly described as a “ladies’ man, man’s man, man about town,” is assigned to profile her, and makes it his mission to expose Novak’s philosophy as a fraud. Hence he disguises himself as the astronaut Zip Martin, and begins to politely, demurely court the more forward Barbara. There’s also a bunch of business involving the leads’ respective sidekicks, played by David Hyde Pierce (in what’s traditionally considered the Tony Randall role, tacitly blessed by Randall himself in a small supporting role) and Sarah Paulson (who somehow gives one of her least affected performances in an extremely self-conscious, stylized movie).
The broad story of Down with Love is predictable, though some of its zanier turns do make a good-faith effort to keep the audience on their toes late in the game. McGregor and Zellweger have their charm dials all the way up; with musicals fresh in their respective repertoire, they still move through the picture like they could burst into song and/or dance at any time. (They finally do in a delightful end-credits sequence.) Cute as they are, the movie elicits even bigger swoons with its style, a lavish heightening of the mid-century aesthetic that audiences loved to see in Mad Men, which began some years later.
Peyton Reed, who was following up modern classic Bring It On, brings Down with Love just to the edge of spoof, and it occasionally crosses that line with wink-wink jokes that are a little easier to crack than the genuine sincerity of the movie’s unofficial source materials. For the most part, though, the movie simply revives a degree of craft not always present in romantic comedies of the early 2000s: Dialogue packed with double entendres, zingers, and one-liners; luxurious production design on potentially basic interiors like apartments and restaurants (the movie uses few if any real New York locations, but its backdropped faking of them is plenty expressive); playful costume design; gags set up not just with words but by editing and framing, sometimes in split-screen (another Pillow Talk homage). To be honest, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days could never.
Rom-com filmmaking has only gotten worse since 2003; even some of the more charming streaming offerings tend to operate in the binary of overlit, or nondescript. This makes Down with Love a throwback within a throwback: Enjoy the budgetary freedom a fun star-driven comedy received in 2003, and then enjoy how that freedom was used to evoke movies from four decades earlier. Somehow, it adds up to a movie that dates itself firmly in 1962 and also feels totally timeless.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
