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BY PEG ALOI
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In what might have been a suave, swinging homage to the Rock Hudson/Doris Day cat-and-mouse romances of the 1960s, director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) serves up a pastel-colored ice-cream soda of a movie: sweet and bubbly at first, it soon turns cloying and flat. Renée Zellweger’s Barbara Novak is a small-town gal recently arrived in LA; Ewan McGregor’s Catcher Block is a London playboy journalist who supposed to interview her about her latest sex-and-the-single-gal bestseller. Thinking she’s a bitter spinster, he keeps standing her up; then he bumps into her one day and decides to pose as a naive Southern beau, and the game’s afoot: he’ll make Down with Love’s author fall for him. The retro production design wallows in gaudy authenticity (don’t miss the opening titles), and Sarah Paulson and David Hyde Pierce (Barbara’s agent and Catcher’s editor) spar and crackle as another reluctant twosome. What’s perplexing is why this film strays so far from its chaste, witty roots. Whereas the flirtations of Doris and Rock were all raised brows and inflection, Renee and Ewan blather inane double entendres and pose in contrived split-screen visuals suggesting (heavens!) oral sex and post-coital torpor. Call me a purist, but I prefer the subtle sincerity of Send Me No Flowers, homoerotic subtext and all.
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