The problem is that this kind of material doesn't suit Zellweger. Doris Day's high-gloss, tick-tock style comes out of her sense of herself as a worker in the family entertainment industry. To her, stardom means a clearly defined image that you put over on call, a branded commodity really. She's very definite, never seems like a victim (even when she plays one) or even soft, and yet her voice can go breathy, can mime dreaminess, but it's always clearly and completely motivated, all on the surface. She's a decal of sunshine, without real joy or a sense of discovery, and there's certainly nothing remote or unlighted in her, no unresolvable internal conflicts or seething unrequited ambitions. Miscast, she will fall short of the demands of a particular picture, but nothing about a Day performance ever exceeds those demands. She may have been the most efficient star the movies have ever known.

Zellweger is all about confusions, about having the drive to pull yourself together despite your treacherous softness. (The mark of that softness is the way her lip pulls down to the right, indicating how steady she's trying to remain.) Her weirdly hopeful wince could so easily qualify her for dishrag roles, but her drive saves her, makes her, in fact, a heroine. There's some resemblance to Dianne Wiest in her expression; I don't know if she'll turn out to be the actress Wiest is but she has a better shot at stardom. And, yes, sex has a lot to do with that: the drama of a young woman's self-discovery, humid with the heat of restlessly slept-in sheets.

Before I saw Chicago I thought she'd be all wrong for the material, which seemed to require shellacked high style. Catherine Zeta-Jones fills that order, however, and Zellweger transforms the role of Roxie Hart in contrast to it. She plays her as a dupe who becomes a vamp by soulless tenacity. She has a Barbie doll body with a baby doll head, and a high-pitched, scratchy-breathy voice, but a more intuitive grasp of technique than other squeak-toy stars, such as Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and Melanie Griffith. In Chicago her determination as an actress to use her cuddly assets in a new, harder-edged idiom fuses with the small-time flapper's determination to be noticed. Her Roxie, cheeks flushed and wistful-watchful eyes on the operators she wants to emulate, seems like a girl who's gone straight from infancy to adultery with no stops in between, and that's just the beginning of her education.

Zellweger, both yielding and driven, is infinitely more interesting than Doris Day. (You can compare them head-to-head by watching Chicago alongside Day's '20s period-piece musical Love Me or Leave Me (1955). People still praise her performance though she launches her lines and numbers in such an unrelenting manner that she makes nonsense of Ruth Etting's masochistic life story.) Zellweger, however, doesn't have the poise for what she's attempting in Down with Love. She looks like she's having fun pursing her lips and moving her shoulders rhythmically as she makes entrances in designer doll outfits, but she doesn't create a character out of it. She doesn't achieve a new effect and we can't detect the Zellweger we know, either, until too late in the movie.