Down with Love (2003)

EDIT (May 2016): I’ve upgraded this from good (which I gave it when I reviewed it back in December 2013) to excellent because I’ve realised upon re-watching that it is clearly one of my favourite films. It is just such sheer delight to watch Sarah Paulson and David Hyde Pierce in particular.

Occasionally when re-watching DVDs, I like to look back at its entry on Rotten Tomatoes and check what the critical consensus (in so far as it’s represented there) suggests about a film. Therefore I was surprised to find a distinct lukewarm-ness with regards to this brightly-coloured Technicolor pastiche of 1960s romantic comedies. Surprising because although I can’t honestly hold it up as a masterpiece [EDIT 2016: I can and I do], I do still love Down with Love (I own a copy, after all). Perhaps telling you about how it provided me cheer on a dreary evening in Prague, when I was travelling around East Europe ten years ago, is hardly effective film criticism, but there you go: it is a zippy, frothy, stylish little film that doesn’t really set out to make any grand statements.

The leads are stylishly iconic journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) and arriviste naïf and newly-published author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger), who do their best Rock Hudson and Doris Day impressions—appropriate, given that the film takes its most visible cues from such period comedies as Pillow Talk (1959). Yet, as much as you may imagine that I appreciate McGregor’s mellifluous name, I’ve never been a huge fan of either him or Zellweger as actors. It’s not that they have great chemistry here, but they certainly do both look the part. They wear the clothes well, in other words, and show a fair amount of gameness in putting across such gurning caricatured characters, blending effortlessly into the saturated colours of the mise en scène.

What really sells the film, though, are David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson as Pete and Vikki, the respective editors of the two leads. Sure, Pierce is doing a version of his neurotic character on TV show Frasier, which can hardly have been much of a stretch for him, but his performance also harks back to Tony Randall in such films as Frank Tashlin’s sparkling Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957, and which for the record is a masterpiece). That Randall himself makes a cameo appearance as the head of Pete’s publishing company is just another nod towards that rich filmic heritage. As for Paulson, seen most recently by me as the uptight sister in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), she is unrecognisable here, achieving some perfect comic timing in her delightful repartees with Pierce, and guiding Barbara towards her hard-headed feminist success. Both actors put across a degree of acting brio that lifts the film, and if it never really moves beyond pastiche, it is at least a very accomplished and enjoyable one.

I’ve mentioned the look of the film, all saturated colours in the set design and widescreen cinematography, and bold contemporary fashions. There are certainly far worse stylistic benchmarks to emulate than that of Frank Tashlin (whose pop culture films from the 1950s are particularly worth checking out). Elsewhere, there’s some predictably broad humour in some of the touches, like the anti-war protestors and the ridiculous use of iconic buildings in the intro sequence, where every change of shot—from Barbara’s arrival to her getting a cab uptown—showcases a different (and geographically impossible) New York sight. Elsewhere, use is made of the kind of split-screen techniques seen in Pillow Talk, but for groaningly double entendre purposes.

It would of course be very easy to marshal all this detail as successively damning points against the film’s sunny inanity—like baking a soufflé, this kind of enterprise, aiming for light frothiness, can so easily collapse. Therefore it’s up to each individual viewer to judge whether it’s been successful. For me, though, Down with Love is a consistent joy, and one I like to revisit every so often.

CREDITS
Director Peyton Reed; Writers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake; Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth; Starring Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson, Tony Randall; Length 97 minutes. Seen at a cinema in Prague, Friday 3 October 2003 (and since then on DVD at home, London, most recently on Tuesday 10 December 2013 and Thursday 5 May 2016).

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

By this point it’s well enough known that the original novel on which this film is based took its inspiration from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (though not so much by me, who had to be apprised of this fact by my wife upon expressing surprise at the similarity in both name and casting between Colin Firth here and in the BBC TV adaption of said Austen novel some years earlier). Bridget Jones is a nice middle-class girl who lives in an attractive area (in this case a scrubbed-up London, above a pub in Borough Market, rather than the countryside) with a group of dedicated single friends (rather than sisters), who dallies with chaps of much greater income.

In this sense, some of the class-conscious social-climbing drama is retained from the Austen original, while those awkward rituals of social mixing set to elaborate dances are here replaced by society soirées and press launches. It is all very nicely transposed to a modern setting, and Elizabeth Bennet/Bridget Jones (played by Renée Zellweger) now has a largely thankless job in a publishing company, which suits the film’s impression of the vapidity of the media.

I suppose the problem for me is in creating a modern story of a woman in search of a man, when there is no corresponding sense that without one her family will be in penury. I suppose it’s a commentary on the way that while women’s rights and options in life have moved on in two hundred years, the messages provided by the media have changed little, though if so it’s not always very clear. She has a professional job at which she is apparently competent, though the film is more interested in those times when she makes a fool of herself (for obvious comic reasons). She does not need either her boss Daniel (Hugh Grant) or the stand-offish Mr Darcy (Colin Firth) and yet it is on these men she obsesses, and whose interest in her define her life and her story.

Of course, the story is presented as her diary, so it is very much one for which she is setting the narrative tone. Many moments are played as if scenes from big Hollywood films, with Bridget’s requisite triumphs and humiliations shot in a non-naturalistic style (it’s a precarious line separating it from Ally McBeal, a TV show I detested but which pursued a similar aesthetic, though I think the film is successful). So this is her story, and yet even if it’s one in which she seems to be beholden to all the traps of women’s magazines (a careful detailing of her diet, smoking habit, and ploys to attract men), she still seems to revel in a kind of unrestrained physicality. Zellweger looks healthy and charming in the role of Bridget despite other characters’ barbs about her being ‘fat’, not to mention her unapologetic nicotine addiction.

Whatever my reservations about the presentation of Jones’s character, it’s a likeable and charming film thanks primarily to the three leads, who all have excellent screen charisma. It certainly feels like pleasant watching for a drowsy afternoon while on holiday, which is where I saw it.

CREDITS
Director Sharon Maguire; Writers Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis (based on the novel by Helen Fielding); Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh; Starring Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent; Length 97 minutes. Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 4 August 2001 (and on TV at holiday apartment, Rovinj, Saturday 1 June 2013).