Down with Love

REVIEW
It plays like Pillow Talk, it sounds like Sex and the Single Girl, and, geez, it looks just like it was shot in 1962, from the elaborately artificial sets to the glorious Cinemascope logo that opens the film. But Down with Love is more than a carbon copy of the delightfully innocuous sex comedies of the '60s. Like Far from Heaven, it updates the characters a bit, bringing issues like homosexuality bubbling to the surface, while detailing the corners of the frame with a loving touch that was absent from the simply manufactured originals. Zellweger plays a modern woman who writes a hit self-help book, advocating sex without love for the repressed female masses. Enter the dashing McGregor as Catcher Block, the lothario who wants to write an exposé on her and prove that all she wants is love. The plot machinations lead to a winning mating dance peppered with more double entendres than an episode of "The Match Game." Pierce is brilliantly cast as the Tony Randall type: a fey would-be ladies' man who's plagued by the image that he's really bedding his best friend Catcher. That Randall himself appears as Zellweger's two-initialed publisher is just icing on this delectable cake.