Pierce, ever the paragon of uptight prissiness, is playing what was, 40 years ago, the Tony Randall role, and it is delightful to see Randall himself saunter through a scene or two, bestowing his sly, patriarchal blessing. Down With Love works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's Lover Come Back, the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.
Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, the screenwriters, have shaken together a canny cocktail of period vernacular and deliberately labored double entendres, some of which extend for entire scenes. The best moments have a glorious, hectic artificiality, emphasized by split screens, gimmicky editing and the obviously cardboard three-quarter moon that bobs in the ersatz Manhattan sky.
As always, the final destination on this jaunt is matrimony, and the filmmakers, so meticulous in their imitation of the dress and decor of the Kennedy era, are unabashed revisionists in matters of sexual politics. Their tribute is also an updating and a critique, informed by the commonsensical feminism that Barbara Novak's best seller parodies and also by an impatience with the hypocrisy that was the source of all the fun to begin with. This movie can, without blushing, make jokes that acknowledge the existence of premarital and nonheterosexual sex, things that its ancestors could address only in code.
The obsolescence of that code -- and of the Code itself -- has the effect of flattening out the movie's humor and making its strenuous cleverness feel, in the end, more dutiful than daring. The most obvious recent point of comparison is Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, which was devoted to reanimating the Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk, several starring Hudson. (Down With Love and Far From Heaven might best be described as offerings to the memory of Ross Hunter, who produced both Pillow Talk and Sirk's Imitation of Life in the same year.)
Haynes plunged into the subtext of the old movies, exploring their deep springs of anxiety about race, marriage and sexual identity. Some of these were present in the comedies as well: their hectic ridiculousness reflected a world in which the rules of conduct were being rapidly rewritten.
But Reed snips that subtext away, and his movie takes the mandate of inoffensiveness much more seriously than its winking, tongue-in-cheek predecessors ever did. As it tweaks the attitudes and behaviors of the past, Down With Love is careful to uphold the right-thinking norms of the present, denying the audience the pleasures of subversion and satire and managing, in spite of its knowing good cheer, to be less sophisticated than what it imitates.
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