because you can't have too much entertainment... June 2003

Cherry on Top
Dir: Peyton Reed Screenplay: ???
Starring: Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson,
Geri Ryan, and Tony Randall.

All hail Peyton Reed! It isn't every day that Hollywood's mainstream offers up an auteur who specializes in frothy comedies. In fact, most directors who gain cultural capital and critical kudos work in far heavier modes of storytelling. Now, I don't want to get ahead of myself here. With only two films under his belt, Reed's career could still go any which way. But right now I'd place him as the cherry on top of the new wave of 30something American directors. Whether or not Reed has a unique enough vision to make a mark in the wake of the truly remarkable batch that sprung up in the late 90s (P.T. & Wes anderson, David O' Russell, and Spike Jonze) remains to be seen.

I initially had some difficulty getting through Down With Love. Though crisp, bracingly funny at times, and always offering up A+ eye candy, my mind kept wandering to other films. It wasn't just the Rock Hudson and Doris Day comedies which Down With Love purposely apes. That connection is a purposeful doppelganger You're meant to note the similarities and, then, giggle knowingly at the subversions. What troubled me more was the contemporary distractions. Despite this romantic comedy's overall singularity, I kept flashing to Moulin Rouge! (McGregor in heightened stylized love affair) and Chicago (the once warm and cuddly Zellweger playing all cold and ambitious again. And even singing and dancing, too) and of course last year's masterpiece, Far From Heaven, which shares this films retro fetish (if nothing else). Still, should a film lose you to mental movie-hopping, it could do a lot worse than keeping company with those pictures. Eventually, once Down With Love achieves a peculiar comic rhythm, it becomes clearly its own film.

Down With Love aims high and, as a result perhaps, misses occasionally. One particular sequence (a bit with the split screen and phone calls) takes the modernizing of the previously witty sexual innuendo to such extremes that's it goes from amusing to vulgar in record time. More troublesome still is a lack of chemistry between the leads. Ewan McGregor plays Catcher Block, a 'ladies man, man's man, man about town.' and Renée Zellweger plays the independent and sexually progressive Barbara Novak. Both are plum well-constructed roles and the actors seem clearly jazzed about the sandbox they get to play in. Individually they're a treat. Unfortunately (and to the film's major detriment) they seem not-so-equally -jazzed about each other. Fortunately, Down With Love's joys are many and do much to compensate. The production design, costuming, scoring, and editing in particular are all marvelous and, in many ways, the films raison d'être. The screenplay, too, is a witty delight giving each of the principles more than enough of a chance to shine (second banana Sarah Paulson in particular is a joy to watch as Novak's chain-smoking editor). The occasional misstep aside, Peyton Reed delivers again.

It's no small task to make a picture this ambitious and detailed feel like anything but hard work. The film's lightness reconfirms what many happy viewers, myself included, suspected after the confident Bring It On bowed in 2000. Peyton Reed has the rare knack for joyful comedy. In an amusing end credits note, we're told that the director reads Know magazine and drinks Tang, the drink of astronauts. Both habits are references to Catcher Block's own überhip persona within the film. Given that only die hard film enthusiasts read end-credits it's probably an inside wink or mash note to the director himself. He more than earns the compliment. Peyton Reed is the coolest auteur in town. B

-Nathaniel

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