Thursday, May 15, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Every Doris has her day

By Anthony Allison

"Mr. Allen, this may come as a shock to you, but there are some men who don't end every sentence with a proposition."

--Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959)

Any film in which the production design can make you laugh out loud has to be worthy of notice. The only problem with Down with Love, however, is it's not entirely clear whose attention the film is trying to grab.

With a witty, wordy script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, and deliberately exaggerated comedic performances by Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, Bring It On director Peyton Reed's comedy is a slick pastiche of Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers.

But anyone old enough to remember those prehistoric sex comedies, starring Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall, is likely to be in a geriatric ward, ingesting AMC and TCM intravenously. And fans of Obi-Wan and Bridget Jones probably will find this parody too tiresomely precious for words.

Like Gus Van Sant's scene-for-scene Psycho remake, you can't help concluding that the cast and crew had so much fun re-creating antediluvian filmmaking techniques that they forgot about their audience. It's all here: split screens and back projection, New York nightlife montages and fake cityscape backdrops. There's Andrew Laws' flamboyant decor and Daniel Orlandi's '60s-chic costumes, Jeff Cronenweth's Technicolor-garish cinematography and Marc Shaiman's snazzy-jazzy score that intrusively "comments," with quizzical grace notes, on the action. Though the script positively drips with witty repartee and groanworthy double entendres, it never quite sinks to a low enough common denominator to attract the Austin Powers crowd. Still, viewers who are hip to the Day-Hudson oeuvre will doubtless enjoy this inventive variation on a familiar battle-of-the-sexes theme.

Zellweger plays writer Barbara Novak, whose proto-feminist self-help book Down with Love (advocating chocolate and career instead of love and marriage) becomes a worldwide bestseller. Much to the chagrin of ace investigative journalist and serial womanizer Catcher Block (McGregor), as Novak's star rises, so does her indifference to Catch's ever-increasing ardor. Meanwhile, Catch's boss/buddy (David Hyde Pierce) is equally unsuccessful in his pursuit of Novak's feisty editor at "Banner House" (Sarah Paulson).

Zellweger can be intensely irritating at the best of times. But she manages a creditably convincing version of the trademark bright-eyed Day style, as she builds toward her Big Speech in which she recounts the entire convoluted plot in one long, uninterrupted take. It's an impressive stunt, the acting equivalent of a seal balancing a ball on its nose.

McGregor has even more fun with his suave, sophisticated character, a self-styled "ladies' man, man's man, man about town," part-Sean Connery, part-Rock Hudson, whose corny old hick-from-the-Texas-sticks seduction stratagem goes hilariously awry.

But it's Hyde Pierce who totally steals the show in the Randall sidekick role, effortlessly pulling off the tricky feat of adopting just the right tone with the inevitable gay innuendo. He makes it funny while flashing a serious, postmodern nod at contemporary viewers who, looking back with supercilious, AIDS-era hindsight, will ponder the cruel irony that the closeted Hudson had to go along with that stuff for real four decades ago, and realize not much has changed since those benighted times.

Randall himself pops up, in a cameo as publishing boss Theodore Banner, to give the proceedings his crowd-pleasing seal of approval.

It's always a relief to find a studio comedy that credits viewers with possessing at least half a brain. So old coots fond of complaining that they don't make 'em like they used to should check it out. As one character aptly says, "It's one drug-infested beatnik shindig. Ya dig?"