Review – Down with Love

Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellwegger have both been in more charmless movies, but that’s at least in part because he did Star Wars Episode 2 and she did Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. This movie has a number of things going for it. The cast is solid, or at the very least capable of keeping up with the sitcom plot. The art direction is likewise good, creating a 1962 that never existed outside home décor catalogs. The dialogue isn’t even all that bad; indeed, it manages to be charming in a silly sort of way. The problem turns up when the film-makers try to graft 21st century sensibilities onto a 60s-era battle of the sexes. By the second or third false ending it should be apparent to all just how hard they’re working to get the two incompatible outlooks to mesh somehow. Moral of the story: screwball comedies don’t need to be morally uplifting. In fact, they may actually be better when they aren’t. Mildly amusing