Candy-colored 'Love' wins friends and influences people
For the first 10 minutes of "Down With Love," I cringed, I sighed, I thought to myself, "There's no way I can sit through an hour-and-a-half of this."
It's too cute and perky - even though I always like the adorable Renee Zellweger. It's too self-consciously retro - this isn't "Austin Powers," after all.
And it barged its way into my day with relentless force. Its candy-colored sets, lavish Technicolor wardrobes for Zellweger and its winky-winky way with dialog prodded and poked - just daring me to smile.
And I couldn't help it. I not only smiled, I laughed out loud.
"Down With Love" lives in the early 1960s, as the country segued from the square-hip 1950s to the sexual revolution of the mid-to-late 1960s.
It pits feminist writer Barbara Novak (Zellweger) against Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), the swinging, dashing journalist for the top men's magazine, Know.
Novak sets the publishing world - and women the world over - on a collision course with societal expectations with her advice to women to swear off love and engage in sex for the sheer pleasure of it, just like men do. As a corollary to the rule, Novak tells women to focus more on themselves - eschewing their traditional female roles in order to discover their true selves.
Women flock to bookstores to scoop up the advice - and stop cooking, cleaning and waiting on their husbands in favor of a little female empowerment.
This is all fine with the almost all-male publishing company because of the money it's making - until these men's wives also start following Novak's advice.
Block - who's encountered nary a glitch in getting women to shed their inhibitions - decides Novak's a sham, and he goes undercover to prove it. By pretending to be a gentlemanly, hokey Southern-bumpkin astronaut, he sets out to seduce Novak, make her fall in love with him, catch her admission on tape and expose her - demoralizing all of the suddenly uppity women into retreating to their proper submissive roles.
But Novak isn't as easy a target as Block thinks she is - and their interplay as they try to figure each other out is clever, sexy and funny.
A subplot involving Block's hapless-with-women boss Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce) and his romantic yearnings for Novak's editor Vikki Hiller (Sarah Paulson) meshes hilariously with the main storyline.
And this movie wouldn't be the same without the eye-popping colors. Brightness and contrast aside, the attention to detail is amazing - in a split-screen scene, Novak's telephone cord is the same springy green as Block's shirt; a slick black telephone matches her hat in another; fiery orange cookware pops in the kitchen of McMannus' stylish abode.
Stylish Zellweger must have had a fabulous time in wardrobe - her of-the-moment outfits hyped up with pink plaids, yellow-and-black prints, deep blues and over-the-top hats change with nearly every scene.
One caveat: This is probably not a movie women would want to force their husbands or boyfriends to go see against their will. It's about as "chick" as a chick-flick gets. But if you do go, don't leave at the "end" of the movie. Stay for the McGregor-Zellweger song and dance number - and join in the applause.
Additional Information:
Movie Details
'Down With Love'
Director: Peyton Reed.
Stars: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor.
MPAA rating: PG-13, for sexual humor and dialog.
