Down with Love ** (2003, Ewan McGregor, Renée Zellweger, Tony Randall, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Poulson) – Classic Move Review 3029

Director Peyton Reed’s 2003 retro soufflé movie tries to pair Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger as a romantic team, with mixed, mostly disappointing results.

McGregor and Zellweger try to make a stylish Sixties-type romantic comedy but drown in a vat of flat bubbly. It’s Manhattan 1962, and he’s a playboy journalist called Catcher Block (!) and she’s an advice author named Barbara Novak, and their love is in bloom, even if she doesn’t care for his playboy lifestyle. [They might have just as well called him Writer’s Block and had done with it!]

The movie looks suitably chic in Jeff Cronenweth’s bright cinematography and Andrew Laws’s eve brighter sets. And there are occasional bright flashes of the sparkling film the producers clearly wanted it to be. But the stars are miscast and uninspired, and the inconsequential script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake is crudely fashioned and drossy.

McGregor and Zellweger are nobody’s idea of a new Rock Hudson and Doris Day, he particularly lacking the lightness of touch and American style needed for this kind of fluff. Poor old Tony Randall (co-star in the real Hudson and Day movies) is wasted as Theodore Banner in his last movie before his death on 17 May 2004, aged 84, but David Hyde Pierce adds a little fun as hero’s friend, Peter MacMannus, the kind of role Randall played back in the Sixties.

Harold Arlen’s old song Down with Love inspires the movie and provides its title.

Peyton Reed is also known for Bring It On (2000), The Break-Up (2006), Yes Man (2008) and Ant-Man (2015). McGregor and Zellweger re-teamed for Miss Potter (2006).

Classic Move Review 3029