The pedigree here couldn’t be higher: stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are perfectly matched and at the top of their game, and director Edward Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) brings an unusually high level of competence to the proceedings. But like some other recent high-profile romantic comedies (No Strings Attached), there’s an interesting film somewhere in Love and Other Drugs that is eventually overwhelmed by a strict adherence to genre conventions.
The title is a key indicator. Love and Other Drugs, Love and Other Disasters, Life or Something Like It, Life as We Know It, etc.; all cutesy-generic, instantly forgettable titles that show no more creativity than an average direct-to-DVD Steven Seagal film. Incredibly, Love and Other Drugs began life as a Jamie Reidy book titled Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman. Based on the title alone, which would you rather see?
If you said Love and Other Drugs, I daresay this movie will not disappoint. Me, I couldn’t get enough of the Viagra Salesman stuff, and was heartily enjoying the film until it switched gears halfway through.
Set in the mid-1990s, Drugs stars Gyllenhaal as Jamie Randall, a womanizing med school dropout who goes to work as a drug rep for Pfizer; using branded pens and umbrellas, he tries to get doctors to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac, and uses his skills to get in good with their secretaries.
Jamie isn’t a moral, upstanding guy. He’s downright sleazy as he pretends to be a doctor in training to get a look at patient Maggie Murdock’s tits, and then has the balls to hit on her outside. But when Pfizer introduces Viagra, the new erection drug, Jamie is just the right scumbag to sell it.
Maggie (Anne Hathaway) is a Parkinson’s patient who is afraid of commitment: she knows what a long-term relationship will take from a partner, and isn’t willing to become that kind of burden. Instead, she likes to screw around and then get all mopey and cynical and tell the guys to buzz off. So she hooks up with Jamie… I wonder where this is going?
It’s a testament to Gyllenhaal and Hathaway that this movie is watchable at all – as written, their characters are downright unlikable. To get us to care about these people is no small feat, but the actors just about pull it off. And they look great together. The frequent nudity doesn’t hurt.
Now, I would have loved a movie about the Viagra salesman, and very possibly a movie about the Parkinson’s patient, and even maybe a movie about the two of them and the full consequences of their relationship.
Love and Other Drugs, while containing elements of all of that, ends up being none of that. As polished, good-looking, well-shot, well-acted, and smoothly put-together by director Zwick as this film is, it is ultimately, inescapably, cookie-cutter rom-com junk food complete with wildly inappropriate happy ending.
Worst of all: the generic “buddy” character, here Jamie’s brother Josh (Josh Gad). He seems to be in another film with all his inappropriate comic relief, and he’s a real detriment whenever onscreen. A great supporting cast is mostly wasted, including George Segal and Jill Clayburgh (in one of her final roles) as Jamie’s parents.
