Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” brought a new twist to the old Hollywood love story: romantic comedy as therapy. After Allen, most contemporary love comedies have been curiously introspective and weighed down with a kind of purgative energy. One or both of the romantic leads must overcome an essential problem in his or her personality before the match is made. These days the name of the game is not ‘boy meets girl’ but ‘boy meets girl and must find a way to protect and nurture his precious insecurities’. Often two people will start a relationship on the basis of a common neurosis or habitual dislike of something or someone, a hardy and protean aphrodisiac from “The Graduate” to “Reality Bites” and on and on.

What’s so refreshing about “Down With Love” is that it has none of what most recent romantic comedies hang their hats on: arch, navel-gazing complaints. The self-consciousness is there in spades, but in the form of meta-fiction, a tasty bon-bon that riffs on countless old farces of the sixties in a manner suggesting both homage and parody, entirely satisfying in both regards. Each of the charming quartet rushes breathlessly through the plot, never stopping to turn the microscope on his or her own failings. Perhaps it is no accident that a telescope features in a few of the jokes; for once we are treated to stargazers, not shoegazers. There is perhaps much to complain about in their world, but such fulminations belong outside the film’s purview, a fact wittily established in the first scene when Barbara pays no mind to a gaggle of “Ban The Bomb” picketers as she hurries into a cab. This Catcher couldn’t be further apart from Salinger’s; “Down With Love” checks its angst at the door.

Like most comedies of this type the lead actors are a primarily aesthetic choice no more or less important than the sets and costumes (but that is to praise the props, not belittle the actors). “Down With Love” pairs Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger in a miracle of synergetic paleness. This helps create the film's hothouse feel, as if these two are on loan from some sunless Smithsonian, rare specimens preserved like dolls in silos of glass. Zellweger’s doughy and doe-like Barbara is a nice counter to the sleek and virile compactness of McGregor’s Catch. Though writers and adversaries, the two don’t bounce zingers off each other like, say, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in “His Girl Friday”, but as it turns out there’s a good reason for that. Apropos that reason, Zellweger’s casting was particularly inspired, especially evident after the plot provides her with a lengthy one-take speech that reveals a scheme worthy of a criminal mastermind, a Cosmo Keyser Soze. By the end of the film, Zellweger has transformed her character from a Fifth Avenue princess to a country mouse and back again. She goes from a wisp of cotton candy into a three-dimensional woman, located (inexactly, of necessity) somewhere between B.N. and N.B., Maine and Manhattan.

Of course, Barbara is hardly literary enough to make us believe she could be a writer of any value, but then neither is Catch. In a more serious film this would be deadly, but here it is actually one of the movie’s assets: two leads as bestselling writers takes us back to a fairy-tale time, now long forgotten, in which such an occupation was glamorous, could be the stuff of a high-society comedy. It’s taken for granted in “Down With Love” that the New York publishing world actually means something— style, charm, money, the top of the heap— no doubt a difficult and alien concept to grasp for audiences in a ‘paperless’ (read: illiterate) world.

Ah, the city. The New York of “Down With Love” is that glitzy two-dimensional cocktail of Billy Wilder and “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”, as perfectly idealized as the Paris of “Moulin Rouge” (and as disappointingly devoid of allusions to real writers and artists of its time and place). Scrubbed in bright blues and vivid pinks, the airy apartments look as cheerful and unlived-in as game show living rooms. Impossible cityscapes are glow-lamped by impossible moonscapes, all the marquees of Broadway are in full neon bloom, and Catch knows that when he confidently tells Henri, the maitre’d, to spread the word about his new disguise to “all the other doormen and taxi drivers”, it will be done with ease; for the young and upwardly mobile, New York is no vaster or unfriendlier than Grover's Corners. This sort of affection is cheap and easy to come by—no other city in the world has been eulogized as New York has—but the artificially breezy Manhattan of “Down With Love” is somehow more genuine than the faux-bohemian lofts and stale cappuccinos of most modern New Yorks. And then there is its precious and vanished innocence, not of a city in which the Twin Towers still stand tall, but of a city thriving before they were built in the first place.

“Down With Love” also boasts the ingredient sorely missing in contemporary romantic comedies: flamboyancy. The look and feel of the movie is colorful to the point of blazing campiness (in The New Yorker Anthony Lane confessed concern over his inordinate fondness for the reversible yellow/checked coats worn by Barbara and Vicki), but manages to stop short of midnight-movie nudges and winks. It reminds us that once upon a time, in the not-too-distant past, heterosexuals were capable of letting loose with stylish, sophisticated, and ribald humor set off by an unapologetically snazzy mise en scène. Of late, far too many straight rom-coms have been caged up in drab, over-earnest, unmusical frumpiness.

David Hyde Pierce’s pusillanimous Mac displays signs of homosexuality, it’s true, and in effect he fills the role of the gay supporting character. But Mac seems more than just the usual comic foil for the ladies’ man: writers Eve Alhert and Dennis Drake have added a somewhat anomalous character as if to comment acerbically on the sort of films in which he'd fit right in. He is a buffoon with “twenty diagnosed neuroses” who stumbles over gender politics and even his own sexual confusion while trying to win a girl who already wants him. Sound familiar? If Catch is an old Cary Grant hero, perhaps the joke about Mac is that he’d be more at home in a modern “date movie”, knitting his brows and dispensing cute advice to Jennifer Aniston over a prominently placed carton of Haagen Dazs. Fortunately Alhert and Drake know what to do with him. “I am a man”, says Mac, daily-affirmation style, just before he finally gets up the cajones to plant a wet one on Vicki’s lips. In a sense the film resolves some of the mad instability—however brilliant—that has sweetened to death so many sugary comedies in the wake of “Some Like It Hot”, with its “I’m a boy” dialogue spoken by two men in drag. Mac’s newfound breeder-confidence points to a way out for our moribund romantic comedies. Go get 'em, tiger.