Love and Other Drugs (Review)

The old adage about bad movies is that some are like train wrecks in that you cannot look away. For some reason, I keep coming back to this when reflecting on the new Edward Zwick film Love and Other Drugs. This is not because it is that awful a movie, but instead because it combines many fascinating ideas into an unfocused jumble that intrigues, but also tries a dangerous juggling act that it’s doomed to lose from the start. It wants to be a satire of the pharmaceutical industry in the vein of Thank You for Smoking, but it also wants to be a romantic comedy, a drama about Parkinson’s disease and an indie-style movie which treats the subject of sex frankly. I would watch (or at least endure) any of those movies. Love and Other Drugs throws them all in a blender and serves up a confused smoothie.

Before the movie even starts, the opening logos are set to “Two Princes” by the Spin Doctors. It might have been better off having somebody screaming “This movie is set in the 90’s!” and moving on. Immediately we meet Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jamie Randall, a dashing young fellow working in a RadioShack of sorts. He’s a master salesman, but also an obnoxious perv who starts fooling around with his co-worker in the back room. Next thing you know he’s out of a job, but soon he finds himself a pharmaceutical salesman for Pfizer.

The job is a bit of a struggle at first for our young hotshot, but soon he discovers he can get where he needs to go with just the appropriate amount of confidence, swagger, and sleeping with secretaries. He tries and tries to convince big-time Dr. Stan Knight (Hank Azaria) to prescribe Zoloft to patients instead of Prozac. Less side effects, you see. Sadly, Jamie keeps losing out to another salesman played by Gabriel Macht. Pfizer is doomed to play second fiddle… that is until they come up with a little blue pill for impotence. More on that later.

In the meantime, Jamie happens to meet a purdy little Parkinson’s patient named Maggie Murdock, played by Anne Hathaway. First they go to get coffee at the café where she works, but then five minutes later their clothes come off faster than a sports car on the Autobahn. Maggie insists, due to her condition, that their relationship stay “simple”, but maybe, just maybe, they end up falling in love. Or other drugs. You guess which.

When Jamie starts selling Viagra, suddenly the money starts flowing in, though the film strangely does not focus on the drug more. After a while, the sale of Viagra barely even qualifies as a backdrop for the film, which is a shame. Love and Other Drugs had the potential to be a great comedy/satire about a drug industry that is more concerned selling drugs that help an old man an erection than they are about selling drugs that cure important diseases. There are hints of this, but once the love story with Hathaway is introduced the film does a drastic, whiplash-inducing about-face.

That is not a knock on Hathaway, she gives a great, gut-wrenching performance, but it’s out of a different film. The first third of Love and Other Drugs is a reasonably effective comedy. Then we enter the realm of depressing drama, so that when the film tries to be comic again it just comes off as utterly weird. Both the leads are pretty terrific here, but the material wants to have it every which way it possibly can. Sure, the dialogue is snappy and witty, but it’s all in the midst of a poorly constructed story.

One final thing: nudity in film can have various effects. It can be sexual, disturbing or purposefully awkward, but in Love and Other Drugs I found the absolute quantity of Anne Hathaway nudity puzzling. At the risk of sounding like I’m complaining, let me elaborate. Meaningless nudity doesn’t do much for me, and in this film I was raising my eyebrows in bewilderment. A film like this is not normally the type that calls for such constant explicitness with its sexual content. Yet here it is, and it simply provides another tone for the film to try out.

Edward Zwick, who directed and co-wrote Love and Other Drugs, has had a good filmmaking career, though drama/comedies like this aren’t exactly his cup of tea. Past films have included Glory, Blood Diamond and Defiance. Now he has done Love and Other Drugs. It’s adapted from the book Hard Sell (get it?) by Jamie Reidy, and I’m sure tackling all these important themes would be easier on the page. On film, not so much. Despite giving us the best movie still of the year (see above), Love and Other Drugs tries to be many different movies. Individually, they could have been some of the year’s best. When combined, it’s an admirable but ultimately frustrating mess.

Rating:  (out of 4)