Down With Love is a '60s retro undertaking and lots of fun to look at -- for about an hour.
For anyone who actually sat through some of the dopey Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic comedies that inspired Down With Love, the film is a trip down memory lane.
All others, we fear, will be left slack-jawed and confused in the dark.
Down With Love is set in the early '60s. Renee Zellweger stars here as Barbara Novak, a young woman from Maine who has written a book called Down With Love. It's a pre-lib bible that advises women to swear off love and go for career and sex; it causes a global furor. As her book climbs the bestseller list, our Miss Novak takes Manhattan by storm.
Ewan McGregor is the swinging New York journalist/man about town/bachelor who thinks he can expose Miss Barbara Novak as a fraud. Why, he'll just get her to fall in love with him and agree to marry him, and then he'll show the world that all women want the traditional love and marriage that Novak claims to eschew.
That's the setup. You can almost guess the rest, though the best laughs in the film come from watching the old-fashioned romantic genre get turned on its head. Sort of.
Down With Love is pretty terrific eye-candy, though again, it's hard to know how much appeal it has to anyone who has never seen the original films it's spoofing.
The fashions, the furniture and the film fakery -- all so wonderfully '60s -- are a nicely sustained joke, but that one joke is not worth your $13.50 admission. If you want to see retro done right, rent Far From Heaven.
The cast of Down With Love includes David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson, both of whom -- oddly -- are better at doing that '60s acting thing than are the leads. And Tony Randall, himself a vet of the same '60s romantic fluff movies, has a cameo.
If you're a baby boomer, by all means -- take in Down With Love. It might be fun to bring little kids along, too, to give them a glimpse of the world of long ago. And they won't get the double entendre sexual jokes, so no worries.
Strangely enough, somebody somewhere put in a lot of time and money to recreate a romantic comedy from the '60s that has visual and nostalgia appeal -- but no heart.
Funny how that happens.
(This film is rated PG)
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