Down With Love (2003)
The 2003 romantic comedy Down With Love, directed by Peyton Reed, is, despite its title, really a love letter to the romantic comedies of the 60s, sometimes known as bedroom comedies. Scenes are brightly lit and filled with saturated primary colors, even scenes in cars are done with a shoddy green screen to fully mimic the style of the 60s. Much of the plot is lifted from the 1964 film Sex and the Single Girl, and there are many nods to the early sixties films Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, even a cameo from Tony Randall. But as much as this film borrows, it ends up delivering both a hilarious homage to the rom-coms of the past and a clever modern twist on the problematic themes of those films.
In Down With Love, we meet Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger), an upstart feminist trying to sell her book encouraging women to ditch love for “sex a la carte”. Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) is a “ladies man, man’s man, man about town” reporter who, after blowing Barbara off and seeing her rise to fame, takes on the guise of a simple midwestern astronaut to woo Novak into marrying him and expose her as a hypocrite. After all, what she really want is marriage, like all women. Like the films it tributes/parodies, the plot gets ever more contrived as it goes on, and the leads have their sidekicks (Sarah Paulson and David Hyde Pierce) who help make everything funnier and more confusing.
Reed’s direction shows a commitment to the work he’s referencing, he gives it the classic Hollywood feel with the rapid-fire pacing and witty banter between characters. Little things like the sudden downpour on Catcher as Barbara drives away, the cuts between two characters saying the same line of dialogue (see the beginning of the clip below), and zany costume changes from Zellweger and Paulson make the whole experience feel like a whirlwind. The split screen, widescreen, telephone shots are a reference to Pillow talk, and how the line between them changes from straight to lightning bolt shaped is a cute visual device.
What really works in this movie is the comedic elements, especially the ones that make light of the genre themes of sex roles and gender dynamics. Down With Love is almost overly self-aware, and the way it plays with genre conventions is probably its greatest strength. The 3 minute monologue where Barbara reveals she’s Nancy Brown is the comedic peak of the movie, and the cut to Catcher, mouth agape in shock, is the epitome of comedic timing. Beyond Zellweger’s performance there, what’s great about this scene is just how meta it is. It flips the whole format of the genre on its head in a ridiculously exaggerated plot twist that she had actually orchestrated every plot event in the movie in order to win Catch over. Then it twists once more for good measure, when she decides she won’t marry Catcher, and he has to convince her at the end of the movie.
It’s a mind-bending reveal, but does it really change much of the formula we saw in Sex and the Single Girl? We still see the male lead sacrificing his career for love. The feminist still surrenders some of her independence for love. In fact the whole plot revolves around a woman changing her identity all to capture the heart of her former boss. As incoherent as that may be to the feminist message of the movie, it’s important to remember this is parody. The ending, I think, drives home the film’s meta-critique of 60s rom-coms. Barbara Novak has her own magazine, she’s on the road to a rich, fulfilling career when she turns down Catcher at the interview. Despite this, inexplicably, she appears in the elevator as a redhead (a classic male fantasy) and succumbs to the inevitable happily ever after, complete with a shotgun wedding and musical number. This isn’t the straightforward message of love overcoming feminism, as you could read from Sex and the Single Girl, but a mockery of that message, a humorous parody of the values that created the genre.
