Down with Love

Down with Love
May 16, 2003
Fox
Comedy, Romance, Historical, Musical
DVD
B+

This was a box-office disappointment and there are still people who loathe it, but I find it almost as delightful as I did a dozen years ago.  It is both an over-the-top loving parody of early '60s "sex comedies" and an early 21st-century look at gender roles.  It is a rom-com but it puts surprising spins on the conventions, new and old, as with the moment when it seems like the movie could end but there's another twenty minutes or so.  The dialogue is suggestive and layered in other ways, and there's a lot of physical humor, not just slapstick but things like the stylized ways people walk and smile.

Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor are cast somewhat against both type and archetype.  That is, this is not the usual McGregor role and he's little like Rock Hudson.  Ditto for Zellweger and Doris Day.  The two supporting roles, played by Sarah Paulson and David Hyde Pierce, however, are dead on Paula Prentiss and Tony Randall, although again with little twists and surprises.  (That they're both queer in real life adds yet another layer, as in the Japanese restaurant scene.)  Randall himself, then 83 and a year away from death, has a little gem of a role as the head of the publishing company where the book of the title is ignored and then celebrated.  "Down with Love" is also a song, and music is such an integral part of the movie that I think this deserves the "musical" tag, even if not strictly speaking a musical.

The film is especially notable for the look, as seen in set design and costumes, but also in such touches as a Mad Magazine cover.  It all looks like a slightly hyped-up version of what you would've seen in a 1962 film, from opening credits to closing.  There's also creative (and suggestive) use of split-screen.  If I can't rate the movie higher, it's that it hasn't aged quite as well as I hoped.  I still really enjoy it, but I don't love it as much after multiple viewings.  And it doesn't seem quite so innovative now as it did then.

Just as he had in I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and many other appearances, Will Jordan plays Ed Sullivan.  Sarah Christine Smith was a Go-Go Dancer in Austin Powers #1 and is an Astronette here.  Turtle, who was Cult Member Jeff in Dude, Where's My Car?, plays a Beatnik here.