Outfoxed

Like a Rock: McGregor's OK as a Hudson-esque bachelor but Zellweger's a bad Day.

Down With Love isn't as smart as the movies it mocks.

by Cindy Fuchs

Down With Love's Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) has an enviable reputation as a 'ladies' man, man's man, man about town,' that is, a man who can please everyone. The star writer for Know magazine, he's used to getting his way, utterly charming and completely enchanted with himself, given to snapping his fingers like Frank Sinatra. He's light on his feet, too: When Catcher leaves his spacious bachelor pad for a date, his couple of half-dance steps into the elevator reveal an odd, entrancing grace.

The epitome of swinging bachelorhood circa 1962, Catcher has a different girl for every meal of the day and a lesson to learn by the end of Peyton Reed's adoring, if overeager, homage to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day-Tony Randall romantic comedies in which elegance and in-jokiness were of a piece. The fun of those films lay in their delicacy and innuendo, their trust that audiences got the double and triple entendres without any overt coaching. Even if viewers didn't know Hudson was gay, the movies' send-up of gender roles and sexual performances was immediate and sharp.

Down With Love is less delicate. Proto-feminist author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) arrives in NYC determined to make her new women-should-abandon-love-and-have-sex-like-men manifesto, Down With Love, a bestseller. When her chain-smoking editor Vikki (Sarah Paulson), gets Judy Garland to sing a song of the book on Ed Sullivan, sales take off globally. When Barbara calls out Catcher as the worst sort of man (torpedoeing his dating career), he decides to get even. Much like Hudson in Pillow Talk, he plays a hick, here astronaut Zip Martin, in order to make her fall in love with him and disprove her premise.

The film lurches from set piece to set piece, in part because Zellweger is not a subtle and self-effacing team player like Day, and in part because the innuendo is all on the surface. It's as if writers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, as well as director Reed (best known for the cleverly splashy Bring It On), were afraid viewers wouldn't get it. Rather than the endearing moment when Day and Hudson's toes barely seemed to touch as they extended their legs from separate soapy tubs and spoke by split screen phone in Pillow Talk, here you see Zellweger and McGregor doing contortions and calisthenics to make it look like they're having sex -- missionary, oral and otherwise -- in a series of horizontal and vertical split screens.

The film's most nearly saving grace, aside from McGregor's sweet dance steps, comes from David Hyde Pierce, playing Catcher's editor, Peter McMannus. Fey, neurotic and quick-witted, Peter has an ostensible crush on Vikki, but spends most of his time covering for and conniving with Catcher. (Vikki notes, generously, that Peter's more obvious crush on Catcher is something she's willing to work around.) The scenes shared by Peter and Catcher achieve a precision and buoyancy that the rest of Down With Love doesn't quite. These two make all their moments, from socks-measuring to sauce-tasting, into tight little comic duets.