Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in Down with Love: "Amiam per comodo, per vanità!"

Down with Love is a self-consciously stylized, updated version of the romantic comedies from Hollywood's late-"classic" era in which men try to trick independent-but-starry-eyed women into bed and end up falling in love with them just as the gals figure out what sneaks the men are. The reference point here would be Pillow Talk (1959), starring Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, and Thelma Ritter, and the coordinated set and costume design should probably be listed as a fifth co-star. These "big" comedies of the late '50s and early '60s are as decadently overproduced as the melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk, but have considerably less fascination.

Romantic comedies don't benefit as much from expensive production values; all you need is a quick-witted script and performers with timing who flirt in dialogue. You probably notice the surroundings in inverse proportion to how captivating the central elements are. (And are the clothes in Doris Day movies really that great--the tight dresses with the cups that look like they could fire 21-gun salutes and the sculpted insulation-like hair?) Like the Sirk melodramas, comedies such as Pillow Talk broadly hint around their racy subject--always female chastity--which is what makes them feel so dated, especially since the counterculture, but there were always plenty of sensible people who groaned at this leaden fluff.

Still, these movies have stirred a lot of affection, much of it camp disbelief, but not all of it. Men and women have always gamed each other; these comedies turn that fact into a splashy display of what the players try to hang onto as the game changes on them and the stakes go up. The double meaning of the title Down with Love, the echo of a political slogan in the '60s sense (as in the title of the Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg standard that we see Judy Garland sing in TV footage), and the sense of finding something acceptable in current usage (as in "I can get down with that"), indicates the movie's notion that in sex relations the old can always become the new. There are only so many games you can play, and only so many ways to play them.

Down with Love is much more enjoyable than Pillow Talk. First of all, it not only is much less coy in its own terms, but it turns the older movie's coyness inside out. Renée Zellweger isn't trying to hang onto her virginity, she's a best-selling author who advocates that women treat sex as casually as men in order to focus on their careers. The doctrinaire in the audience may complain when she inevitably falls in love, but the plot is trickier than that, and in any case I've never met an honest career woman who didn't express contrary feelings about romance and work. (I thought the whole point of feminism was that there shouldn't be a single right answer to this essentially modern quandary. See Maureen Dowd's 18 May 2003 New York Times op-ed commentary on Down with Love for a reminder of the educated elite's inability to wrap their theory-addled brains around the biological and anthropological bases of traditional male and female identity. It's a classic of kitschy liberal portentousness, a sitting duck for a parody itself.)

Best of all is what the movie does with the split-screen scenes in Pillow Talk, in which Day listens in irritation on the party-line while Hudson sweet-talks his harem, or else coos directly to the soft-mannered cowboy he pretends to be. Here the split-screen phone conversation between Zellweger and Ewan McGregor turns into an extended series of visual double entendres, as if Penthouse magazine had a fold-over back page like Mad's. Good, open raunch works miracles for suggestive material like this, rooting it recognizably in our bodily experience on this planet. I laughed without embarrassment. (Pillow Talk does strike some burlesque notes with Ritter's commentary, but she's kept on the side, pickled.) And I prefer this "blue" sequence to the tart-romantic one in which the stars dress for their date to Astrud Gilberto and Frank Sinatra's contrasting versions of "Fly Me to the Moon," which is a little too elaborate for the notion the moviemakers are playing out. (It was done with more effective simplicity in the Margaret Sullavan-Henry Fonda picture The Moon's Our Home (1936).)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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