Down with Love (2003)

Peyton Reed's 2003 romance concerns an advice author named Barbara Novak, who arrives in Manhattan in 1962 with a book instructing women to forgo love, take lovers without commitment, and substitute chocolate for husbands. The volume sells. Women worldwide revolt against their men, which is the sort of outcome publishing executives dream about and rarely achieve. The picture stages this as a pastiche of the Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies, complete with split screens, rear projection, and Tony Randall himself, present as a living citation.

The sexual politics here are the engine, not the upholstery. Barbara's crusade gives the film its structure, and the battle between the sexes drives every scene. That is a genuine engagement with feminist ideas, though the film keeps one eyebrow raised throughout, which dilutes the sermon. Elsewhere the ledger is thin. The cast is uniformly white. A running gag has one character conclude that a diffident man must be gay, a misunderstanding played for a laugh and nothing more. Race, climate, class, and body image go untouched.

What lingers is the closing aria, two minutes of verbiage in which Barbara untangles the plot and its thesis in a single breath. It lectures, but it also tap-dances, and the period detail has been quietly renovated so that 1962 can arrive at a conclusion 1962 would not have reached. The result is a confection with a thesis, arch, knowing, and unwilling to commit to its own argument. We have seen worse. We have also seen films that meant it.

Classification notes: no Academy Awards, no sequel or remake lineage, no source novel, no superheroes, and a box office run that opened wide behind The Matrix Reloaded. The film belongs to none of the standard categories, which is itself a small distinction in a landscape that rarely offers one.

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