Just about the time that I was starting to head into the Scylla and Charybdis of puberty, my mother handed to me a book called On Becoming a Woman, which purported to tell me everything I needed to know about love, sex, and the cruel cosmic joke my body was about to wreak on me for the next, oh, 30 or so years. This was long about 1965 or 1966, the Beatles had already come crashing into American popular culture, and this book, published in 1955 by some feminine hygiene product manufacturer or another, was full of references to Doris Day and Rock Hudson and "When Janet Leigh looks at Tony Curtis, you know it's love." Now, to my prepubescent mind, these people were already old fogies to me, and the passages referring to Anthony Perkins as a sex symbol were laughable, as I had already heard more my mother more than once refer to him as "a homosexual." Let's not even go into the descriptions of the dire consequences awaiting girls who "necked....and more....with boys." This stuff was taken right out of the "health books" of the early twentieth century, with references to "spooning" replaced by "necking" and with figures from popular culture inserted to try to make this claptrap "current", people whose popularity had long since been eclipsed by a new generation. If you were a parent in post-Beatles Invasion America, the pat rules of that earlier time must have been reassuring. To me, already trying to be hip, it seemed just as ridiculous as the romantic comedies in which these harmless cultural figures made their mark.

However, to paraphrase Harry Shearer in A Mighty Wind, what was "now-tro" then is retro now, and since those damn baby boomers who run everything are now running the movie business, it's time to focus on our own childhood and bring back the early 1960's. This trend started with Steven Spielberg's breezy Catch Me If You Can last December, and now, with Peyton Reed's DOWN WITH LOVE, a deliciously demented tribute/spoof of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson classic Pillow Talk, this trend has been taken to its cheesiest, funniest extreme.

If there was ever a dead genre that by all rights should stay dead, it's the crossed-legged, chastity-belted kind of fluff that Doris Day and Rock Hudson made famous. But if Todd Haynes could turn the melodrama-soaked tearjerkers of Douglas Sirk into a thoughtful, contemporary art film, and a Broadway version of John Waters' cult classic Hairspray can garner a sackful o'Tony Award nominations, why can't young director Peyton Reed, whose last effort was the surprising Bring it On, send up Rock 'n' Doris?

So the plot doesn't make any sense whatsoever, so what? The point of this kind of film, like much of the Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant-driven dreck it spawned, is to get its two protagonists together. How you do it is immaterial. It's about tension, not fulfillment; it's about the tease, not the consummation. Reed understands this perfectly, and has created a charming film that both sends up and pays tribute to its cornball roots.

Renee Zellweger is Barbara Novak, a cute-as-a-button author who has just published a book called Down With Love, which posits three steps, beginning with substituting chocolate for love, that a woman can take to wean herself from her lovelust and eventually concentrate on just the lust.

In these laddish days of The Man Show and The Best Sports Show Period and Maxim magazine, the idea that Girls Who Do It are threatening to the established order is mind-boggling, and indeed, when Novak's book makes a splash, it's the men who find it threatening -- all except "ladies man, man's man, man about town" Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a writer for the Maxim-like Know magazine, edited by the persnickety Peter McMannus (David Hyde-Pierce of Frasier fame). Catcher decides he's going to seduce Barbara into falling in love with him and expose her in public print for the phony she is. Putting on a pair of Buddy Holly eyeglasses and morphing into down-homeboy astronaut Zip Martin, he chastely pursues her in an effort to break down her resistance.

The film looks marvelous, sending up, in a nearly Austin Powers kind of way, all the accoutrements of early 1960's Movie New York, the relentlessly matching fashions, the bachelor pad, and the Helen Gurley Brown-influenced single gal pied-a-terre. Reed opens the film with a New York vignette that plays like a mirror image of that old Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover in which nothing west of "Jersey" matters. Reed's New York might as well be shot from New Jersey, because in this New York, you can walk across the street from Grand Central Station and hail a cab from in front of the United Nations. Barbara and her editor (Sarah Paulson) make a grand entrance into a restaurant, removing coats of black houndstooth and bright yellow respectively, to reveal chic 1960's sheaths of bright yellow and black houndstooth, respectively. Catcher Block lives in a bachelor pad that is reminiscent mostly of Tim Matheson's frat room from National Lampoon's Animal House as conceptualized by Hi-Fi Magazine, only with even more switches to reveal the bar, the automatically-opening bed, and the stereo playing cool early 1960's schmaltz jazz. In a split-screen sequence that would have been funnier had the Austin Powers films not already used the technique three times, Zellweger, in Daisy Mae shorts on one side, McGregor in a towel on the other, prepare for an evening out while creating suggestive poses with banter to match.

The film is certainly well-cast. Zellweger is perhaps the ideal choice to carry the mantle of Doris Day, for even with an alarmingly thin figure that's incongruous with her round face, she still demonstrates that corn-fed innocence that her compatriots from the America's Sweetheart Agency lack. And playing opposite a less dynamic screen presence than Ewan McGregor, this would be a strong performance. But McGregor is so dashing and exudes such charm, he makes playing this character look as easy as being him would be, even if he is more Rat Pack than Rock. And because Zellweger seems to be trying so hard, she seems to be playing against McGregor, rather than with him. For my money, any woman who can't generate chemistry with Ewan McGregor needs to have her vital signs taken, stat.

Otherwise worthy of mention is the wonderful David Hyde-Pierce. Unfortunately, this guy is beginning to make a career of playing Felix Unger, and here in what is literally the Tony Randall role (Randall himself being reduced to a small cameo that makes us realize just how note-perfect Hyde-Pierce's performance is), he very nearly steals the movie right out from McGregor's nose. References to this character's prissiness as being a sign that he is gay seem jarring in this context, especially since Rock Hudson's own sexuality was sort of an open secret even at the time.

DOWN WITH LOVE is joyful, affectionate cheese, with brilliant technicolor Cinemascope photography by Jeff Chenowith, a period-appropriate, if utterly ridiculous, screenplay by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, and a jazzy/schmaltzy score by Marc Shaiman (who also composed the songs for Hairspray on Broadway, as well as for South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut), which is topped off by a song-and-dance number featuring Zellweger and McGregor that is shown over the closing credits. Watching this alone is worth the price of admission, and will make you wonder what on earth Rob Marshall was thinking when he cast Richard Gere instead of Ewan McGregor as Billy Flynn in Chicago.

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2003 Jill Cozzi and Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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