SOME ASPECTS of Love and Other Drugs–obviously, one of those aspects is not the title–suggest an interesting study of two people favoring the no-strings life. Take one interaction: He, Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal), tells She, Maggie (Anne Hathaway), “I’m going to fuck my girlfriend.” Maggie, the lady just alluded to, says, “Don’t use that word.” And it isn’t the f-word that bothers, her, it’s the g-word: “girlfriend.”
That kind of conversation is about as mature as an American movie is going to get in 2010. Too bad the rest of it is such a hodgepodge. Director Edward Zwick sourced this from an indifferent book, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy, who enjoyed a sweet 1990s as a traveling salesman for Pfizer, precisely at the time that Viagra came out. He handed out samples like Halloween candy, amid parties down with horny doctors and flirty nurses.
In this unfaithful version of the memoir, the breezy Pittsburgh-based salesman and the free-spirited lady meet in a doctor’s office. A hot yet hostile relationship breaks out. Knowing a little about illness, Jamie quickly diagnoses what’s eating Maggie: she has stage-1 Parkinson’s and is determined to have a reckless good time while her body holds out. Maybe there’s the germ of a hard-edged, marshmallow-hearted Billy Wilder–style comedy here. To make Jamie less sleazy, he is bracketed by a pair of worse sinners: Oliver Platt as his doughy, corrupt boss, and Josh Gad as Jamie’s brother, a slobby horndog. Josh gets to deliver the movie’s capitalized, italicized take-away line to Jamie: “You hate women. Why else would you screw so many of them?” (Ah, that’s more like the 2010 cinema we know and love.)
The duo of Gyllenhaal and Hathaway provided the most sexually heated moment in Brokeback Mountain. All the much-vaunted sex in Love and Other Drugs would have more punch if it weren’t deployed in favor of such old-timey screen tropes. Hathaway could have carried this as light comedy, but she comes on furious and knocks this unsteady movie flat. She’s not a sweeping force meeting an equal, opposite reaction in Gyllenhaal: he’s a more matured Jason Biggs from the American Pie movies.
Love and Other Drugs is the proverbial dog that went after two rabbits at once. A romance turning bittersweet is one idea that got away. The other idea is the corruption of the medical establishment. The authorized use of the Pfizer name here tells us the filmmakers are not going to be all that harsh on Big Pharma. Under the direction of the nice guy who created Thirtysomething, it carries the kind of happy ending you’d need a happiness drug to accept.
R
