Love & Other Drugs a Prescription Worth Filling
Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is wandering through his life. His younger brother Josh (Josh Gad) is already a multi-millionaire with a sexy wife thanks in large part to his internet startup company, while his doctor parents James (George Segal) and Nancy (Jill Clayburgh), as well as his fellow M.D. sister Helen (Natalie Gold), can’t fathom what possessed him to drop out of medical school. He’s aimless and searching, using his cocksure personality to get by, looking for a plum opportunity and knowing that when it comes along he’ll have the good sense to grab it and run to prosperity.
Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal get naked in Love & Other Drugs © 20th Century Fox
Suddenly Jamie is working in the upstart industry of pharmaceutical sales, as cutthroat an industry as there is. Working with seasoned salesman Bruce Winston (Oliver Platt), the charming young man soon ingratiates himself with physicians all across town, including Dr. Stan Knight (Hank Azaria), a professional womanizer who’s more well-meaning and good at his chosen profession than he would care to admit.
It’s through him Mark meets Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a sexy and vivacious free spirit who hides a painful secret. She doesn’t want people, mainly men, to get close to her, but for whatever reason she allows the salesman to breach her defenses. But what starts out as sex quickly transforms into friendship, that friendship even more suddenly blossoming into love. Now Mark must face Maggie’s illness head-on while she in turn must decide whether or not she wants to allow him to, the pair having to come to grips with the fact that a life together might be more trying than either of them is prepared to endure.
Love & Other Drugs is not an easy film to encapsulate. It defies genre categorization, jumping from romantic comedy to pure drama almost willy-nilly having tons on its mind but not always sure of the best way to flesh those ideas out. It is a convoluted picture, sometimes pointlessly so, but it also a quite marvelous and emotionally intoxicating one at the very same time, director and co-writer Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, Glory) crafting an elegant delight I thoroughly enjoyed.
Loosely based on Jamie Reidy’s nonfiction Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, the movie is the most unusual blend of comedy, romance and drama since Zwick’s “thirtysomething” left the airwaves in 1991. It jumps genres repeatedly, continually keeping me on my toes and forcing me to remain focused on Jamie and Maggie. It is refreshingly frank, reveling in its innate sexuality while at the same time keeping things honest and real. While the world it revolves within is very much a 1990’s-era construct, the things it is talking about are timeless, and while the central love affair has roadblocks somewhat difficult to comprehend the relationship truths it speaks to are universal.
Sometimes the film’s sudden shifts in tone can be annoying, things jumping from slapstick to medical melodrama almost at the drop of a hat. Additionally, the insertion of Josh as a part of Jamie’s emotional maturation early on (he’s having marital troubles and decides to sleep on big brother’s couch) quickly annoys, the character a rather pointless one whose mannerisms and ticks drove me nuts. I also found the final sequences to be a tiny bit hackneyed, the only thing missing someone to utter, “You complete me,” or , “You had me at hello,” to make the moment a total Cameron Crowe cliché.
And yet, Love & Other Drugs is so well acted, so bracingly honest in its depiction of early onset Parkinson’s Disease, so refreshingly frank where it comes to its characters foibles and insecurities, I almost couldn’t help but slowly come to adore it. Zwick keeps things incredibly grounded and never lets events fly too far off the handle. Better, there are moments of cutting insight that had me flabbergasted, a journey to a Parkinson’s support group meeting so beautifully realized I could help but shed a few tears.
Then there is Hathaway. She is every bit as extraordinary as Maggie as she ever was as Kym in Rachel Getting Married. She throws herself into this thing body and soul and yet her performance never seems forced or false. Every beat she hits, no matter how schmaltzy or tawdry it might appear on paper, ends up feeling genuine. I was with her from the first moment she came upon the screen and without a doubt Hathaway proves she is one of the most gifted and talented actresses of her generation.
The movie isn’t perfect. Zwick relies a bit too strongly on his pop and rock soundtrack to get him from points A to B to C, and some of the switches in tone don’t transition nearly as well as I’d have liked them to. But I believed in Jamie and Maggie’s relationship, wanted to see them make it out of the wilderness intact. Love & Other Drugs is a refreshingly adult love story full of pitfalls and hiccups that kept me watching no matter which direction it decided to go in. It worked for me, and by the time it was over the happiness I was feeling was something no psychotropic prescription could ever hope to duplicate.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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