Down with Love

Directed by Peyton Reed, Down with Love follows Ewan McGregor’s Catcher Block and Renée Zellweger’s Barbara Novak as their initial hatred for one another eventually blossoms into romance. It’s clear right from the outset that Reed, working from a script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, is looking to emulate the feel and tone of such 1960s romcoms as Pillow Talk and Sex and the Single Girl, and there’s little doubt, certainly, that the movie’s intense attention to detail paves the way for a fairly irresistible first half that’s been suffused with agreeable, compelling elements – with, especially, the picture benefiting substantially from Andrew Laws’ eye-popping set design and McGregor’s almost impossibly charismatic performance. (Zellweger doesn’t fare quite as well, ultimately, although the stellar periphery cast, which includes David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson, and Tony Randall, provides more-than-able support around the movie’s margins.) The compulsively watchable vibe persists right up until around the one-hour mark, after which point Down with Love slowly-but-surely abandons its easygoing, freewheeling atmosphere and transforms into something of an ordeal – with the Ahlert and Drake’s efforts at subverting the genre, though sporadically clever, ultimately paving the way for an almost astonishingly misguided final stretch that contains few of the first half’s affable attributes. By the time the feel-good yet entirely anticlimactic finale rolls around, Down with Love has cemented its place as a disappointing failure that rarely fares as well as its myriad of predecessors.

** out of ****