Audacious movies that have too much fun with themselves are taking a big risk. Although they know what they're going for and are obviously having a good time getting there, they can alienate many viewers. Making a mad dash for their goal with reckless abandon, these flicks are easily accused of excess. However, to the viewer who is on the film's wavelength, such excess translates into giddy bliss. There are many of these movies -- think Moulin Rouge, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, spoof comedies like Airplane!, and even that classic nose-tweak at epic movie-making, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I wasn't expecting Down with Love to be this kind of movie,  but there it was -- an over-the-top style homage to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies of the early '60s, featuring plots with plenty of coincidences, misunderstandings, battles of wit, and sexual double-entendres. The film doesn't send up those movies so much as cannonball into the genre's swimming pool. Set in the '60s, Down with Love uses its own heroine and hero, played by Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, to revel in its own convoluted plot, manically wielding sexual politics like a foam bat, up-playing its retro art direction, and shamelessly getting high off of its own silly, witty dialogue. It's great.

It's also hilarious -- one is tempted to call it a spoof, but it really isn't. It has less in common with Austin Powers, which is a comedy that makes something funny out of a genre that isn't funny to begin with, i.e. James Bond/spy movies; and more in common with Far from Heaven, which appropriated an old, presently unused style of filmmaking to tell its own story. Down with Love's template is supposed to be funny to begin with -- plot-wise, it borrows a lot from Pillow Talk, in which Rock Hudson finds it amusing to woo Doris Day using a fake accent, since Day's character actually reviles Hudson's character but only knows him by his voice due to their shared party line. The aforementioned plot devices, clever dialogue, and double-entendres are what Pillow Talk used to get its laughs. Down with Love uses the same tools to achieve a more saturated version of the same kind of comedy.

Yet it doesn't follow the rules that Far from Heaven did, i.e. it is consciously aware of what it is. Remember what I said about a movie having too much fun with itself? Down with Love directly refers to its own format at least a couple of times, but does it playfully out in the open. After all, we're here to have a good time, right? Thus, the movie makes no secret of itself -- it's not a pretentious style-riff for film buffs in the know but an all-out party. Its insistence that everyone be in on the joke is best exemplified in a self-referencing scene that's destined to be a classic, featuring an unbelievably long, unbroken, and very funny monologue by Zellweger.

Zellweger may be the weakest player of the cast, as it turns out, given her too-contemporary sour-lemon smirk, but she has plenty of good performances to bounce off of. McGregor may be no Rock Hudson, but the joy in his swagger while playing a carefree cad is infectious. My favorite character may be the one played by Sarah Paulson, whose spot-on performance as Zellweger's confidant seems totally transplanted from the era of the movie. And in case you were wondering whose classic role David Hyde Pierce has found such a perfect fit within, Tony Randall himself shows up to remind us.

Meanwhile, the music blares, the colors shine, and the fashions make themselves look fashionable again -- all to a greater degree than were originally displayed in a Day/Hudson movie. The sexual innuendos are also much more bawdy; they're capped with a split-screen scene that would have been absolutely scandalous back in the '60s. The movie is indeed excessive, but I found myself tuned to it the entire way. And after I thought I was finished having a smashing good time, the credits arrived accompanied by a musical duet video by Zellweger and McGregor -- I guess they hadn't quite lost the singing-and-dancing bugs they caught when making Chicago and Moulin Rouge, respectively. All the better for those of us who can dig a movie that's having too much fun with itself.

(Released by 20th Century Fox and rated "PG-13" for sexual humor and dialogue.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.