‘Down With Love’ 20 Years Later: Celebrating the Phoniness of Rom-Coms

Twenty years in the past, earlier than the retro-chic intercourse comedy “Down With Love” was launched in American theaters, the anticipation was excessive. The Tribeca Film Festival, then in its second yr, made the movie its flashy opening-night choice. Cheeky promotional photos of its two stars had been ubiquitous: Renée Zellweger was a bona fide It Girl following the success of “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) and “Chicago” (2002); and Ewan McGregor was using excessive after the one-two punch of “Moulin Rouge” (2001) and “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones” (2002).

Then the movie flopped.

Directed by Peyton Reed with a script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, “Down With Love” (accessible to lease on most main streaming platforms) is kind of in contrast to the rom-coms of the time. It is a postmodern throwback to the midcentury intercourse farce: particularly, “Pillow Talk” (1959) and “Lover Come Back” (1961), saucy battles of the sexes starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Roger Ebert authorised of the brand new comedy, however most critics shrugged at what they thought-about a fluffy homage to a a lot better factor.

Audiences within the United States didn’t present up both, proving that the bed room of yore meant little to the common Twenty first-century spectator. The movie value $35 million to make and ended its home run with about $20 million. By distinction “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” one other rom-com launched that yr, acquired $105 million; “Something’s Gotta Give,” $124 million.

In 2003, the golden age of the rom-com was in flux. The heavyweight titles of the earlier decade, a bit of them directed by Nora Ephron (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail”) or led by Julia Roberts (“Pretty Woman,” “Notting Hill”), balanced realism and fantasy, injecting trendy sensibilities and gloriously messy ladies into the tacky happily-ever-after system. With these, the studios hit pay filth, and (per typical), they reacted by growing their output by the aughts.

“We always knew it was going to be a bit of a marketing challenge,” Reed instructed me in a video interview about “Down With Love.” He added, “The whole point of it was that it wasn’t supposed to feel like every other contemporary romantic comedy. So we leaned into that difference with the distinctive sets and the built-in artificiality.”

Before “Down With Love,” Reed had directed the cheerleading competitors comedy “Bring It On,” a sleeper hit that was playfully however thoughtfully constructed: the routines featured Busby Berkeley-style choreography, and one sequence involving a pill-guzzling dance teacher referenced Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz.” No surprise that when Reed got here throughout Ahlert and Drake’s script, he was instantly drawn to its throwback spirit and visible specificity. “Without making a musical, I loved the idea of this very stylized comedy, where the camera and the production design and the wardrobe shapes the humor,” he mentioned.

“Down With Love” takes its beats from the Hudson-Day comedies, but it surely winks again at dozens of cinematic confections from that interval. Like Natalie Wood in “Sex and the Single Girl” (1964), Zellweger’s Barbara Novak pens a world greatest vendor urging ladies to deal with intercourse cavalierly, as males do, and neglect concerning the ring. McGregor’s Catcher Block — the “James Bond of men’s journalism” — enjoys a packed schedule of booty calls. He makes his dashing first look by chopper, descending upon the Know journal headquarters straight from his newest champagne-fueled all-nighter. His breed of manly man is imperiled by Novak’s treatise, so, within the guise of a prudish astronaut from Texas, he courts the enemy to gasoline a success piece proving that her feminism is a entrance.

The movie is a ’60s interval piece certain up in a bawdier, extra sexually specific package deal than that of its predecessors, with Novak and her chainsmoking agent-cum-bestie, Vikki (Sarah Paulson) canoodling round city like the women of “Sex and the City.” And the garments! Ah, the garments are marvelous. It’s a glamorous parade of kitten heels and kooky hats, fringe clothes and fur-trimmed silk robes. The costumes change on the speedy clip of the movie itself, which takes Barbara, Catcher, Vikki and Catcher’s lovesick editor, Peter (David Hyde Pierce), by a sequence of switcheroos and prankish plot reversals that give the women the sting. While the movie’s sexual innuendo-laden banter and exuberant shade schemes appear to recall Austin Powers films, properly, this has extra grace and bubbly femininity than these crude parodies.

“Down With Love” adopted one other previous Hollywood-meets-new manufacturing, “Far From Heaven” (2002), Todd Haynes’s ode to the Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Before “Mad Men” landed on tv in 2007, providing up a seductively slick skewering of the American dream, “Down With Love” and “Far From Heaven” each employed lush nostalgic aesthetics whereas questioning American tradition’s sentimental relationship to the previous. Haynes’s movie was rightfully lauded; “Down With Love,” as we all know, was not. Like one other misunderstood and promptly derided rom-com from that yr, Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Intolerable Cruelty” — a Hepburn-Tracy-like screwball revenge-romp — its type too radically broke with the mould of a style beloved for its consistency.

Reed’s bubble-gum tribute is all snappy wordplay and tongue-in-cheek jabs, however there’s an extravagant phoniness to all of it, too, that calls consideration to its imaginary trappings. Cartoonish rear projections of the Manhattan skyline, split-screen telephone calls that mirror intercourse acts, and routine breaks of the fourth wall give the movie the texture of a pop product that understands its personal recreation, and throws it right into a state of hyperreality.

Mischievously self-aware, it factors to the contrivances that uphold trendy romance, the video games of scheming and flirting that we discover so pleasurable and straightforward to play together with, regardless of their phony and probably regressive underpinnings. The movie pokes enjoyable at retrograde concepts about intercourse and sexuality. Peter, for example, a softy who yearns to be, primarily, a stay-at-home dad, is repeatedly mocked for being a closeted homosexual man. He’s not, however the gag is that everybody round him can’t make sense of a person who doesn’t match the position he’s purported to play.

“This would be really hard to make now. Rom-coms are supposed to be cheap and this had a high production value — $35 million? Studios don’t make these films at that price point anymore,” Reed added.

Indeed, the screwball spirit is in brief provide lately. The lifeless “Ticket to Paradise” didn’t resurrect the punchy him-against-her dynamic of rom-coms previous, and, for the primary half-hour not less than, the Lindsay Lohan automobile “Falling for Christmas” takes on the flamboyantly faux type and deliciously ludicrous plotting of a fizzy farce from the ’30s earlier than beelining into tedious moralizing.

No surprise “Down With Love” has grow to be one thing of a cult merchandise, its meta-referential charms maybe extra obvious to a youthful, queerer era that higher understands the role-playing nature of gender and romantic courtship. I recall seeing the movie projected with out sound at a bar-turned-dance membership in Washington, D.C. In February, at a packed Valentine’s Day-themed screening of the movie in Brooklyn, the giddy viewers was uninhibited with their oohs and aahs.

The movie mocks, but it surely additionally transports with its eye-candy visuals and coy performances, reminding us {that a} suspension of cause is required to carry out gender, to be sucked right into a rom-com and, even, to fall in love.