DOWN WITH LOVE

by Alice Lovejoy

Midway through Peyton Reed's Down With Love, womanizing star journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) and best-selling author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) are dressing, in their respective homes, for a rendezvous with each other. Zellweger, in her bath and airy pink-and-white dressing room, and McGregor, in front of his fit-for-convenience armoire, preen and prance to alternate versions of "Fly Me to the Moon." For Zellweger, it's Astrud Gilberto's sultry suggestion of a celestial voyage, and for McGregor, Sinatra's swaggering demand for something less lofty. In these wordless few moments, Reed reduces Down With Love to its essence, a simple split between softness and brashness, romance and calculation. They might be listening to the same song, but this man and woman are hearing two different pieces of music.

There's a lot of dressing up in this movie, a lot of role-playing. Down With Love's Sixties New York is an elaborate stage, decorated with paper moons and movie-lot building facades, a New York in which you can cross the street at Grand Central and find yourself in front of the U.N. A place, as it proclaims itself to be in the film's first shot, to which dreamers come to realize their dreams, to launch their careers-or perhaps more accurately, to launch themselves. It's an actor's New York, pliable in its geography and boundless in its opportunities.

You can read the complete version of this article in the May/June 2003 print edition of Film Comment.