LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS (Edward Zwick 2010)

[Chris Knipp]

Edward Zwick: LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS (2010)


GYLLENHAAL AND HATHAWAY IN LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS

Satire and sentimentality don't mix

Viewers of Love and Other Drugs might be forgiven for feeling uncertain about what they are watching. Is this an exposé of Big Pharma? A satire on sex practices of the Nineties? A Love Story-like weepie about a young man in love with a young woman who has an incurable disease? All of the above, apparently, and therefore nothing, because they don't mesh. There are connections here between these elements, of course. The young man, Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a skillful Lothario whose seduction (to put it nicely) at his work site of a fellow TV and stereo salesperson gets him fired, whereupon he becomes a convert to Big Pharma. Pfizer turns him into a drug agent responsible for the marketing of an antibiotic and an antidepressant in the Midwest. It is there that he meets the lovely but doomed Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), who appears at one of the doctor's offices where Jamie solicits to ask for a raft of meds for her Parkinson's disease.

At first the attractive pair have nothing but sex, and that's all they both want. Then he falls for her, and she pushes him away, because she doesn't want him to be saddled with her problem. Meanwhile he is struggling to make it big as a rep for Pfizer.

It all starts in 1996. In the opening scene before Jamie gets fired from the electronics store, Gyllenhaal gives a manic yet engaging rendition of a young man's aggressive charm in sales and girl-baiting. The movie sells Gyllenhaal's sex appeal aggressively throughout, frequently showing him in all forms of nudity but frontal, but also baring other breasts, including Maggie's, in her opening scene. The pretext is blatant. Jamie is standing there in the doctor's office pretending to be a medical trainee. When she finds out he isn't, she slaps him in the parking lot. This is their meet-cute.

The mix of ribaldry and sentimentality never works here. Doubtless that's due to the fact that sentimentality has no place in the book on which the movie is based. Jamie Reidy's Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman is described in a review as "a witty exposé" of the practices of the big American drug companies -- rivalries, greed, bribery, all sorts of graft, as well as disenchanted double-dealing and cynical declarations by doctors. Summaries of Hard Sell mention nothing about that Jamie's having a love affair with anybody, let alone a young woman with Parkinson's. We are in the second half of the Nineties. Gyllenhaal, like the book's narrator, is on the scene to become a Viagra salesman when Pfizer puts the miraculous male erection aid on the market in 1998. Till then Jamie has been struggling to push Zoloft against the superior selling power of a ruthless and well-connected Prozac peddler, but when Pfizer comes up with Viagra, suddenly he's The Man. All this is going on, for no particular reason, while Jamie's affair with Maggie heats up.

Another element in the movie conspicuously absent from the book is the Gyllenhaal Jamie's aggressive ambition. The narrator of Hard Sell is a slacker who lists the many ways he and his colleagues got by, making a living as drug reps while doing as little work as possible. In the movie, the Chicago convention is depicted as an orgy (like many conventions), and Jamie has a bout with an overdose of Viagra himself -- as well as a moment of impotence, which is never adequately explained or followed up on. There are chubby foils to Jamie in the movie, his local supervisor (a game Oliver Platt) and his younger brother (Josh Gad), who morphs from a buffoon into a more serious character midway. The movie's Jamie is as aggressive and tireless pushing drugs as he was pushing boom boxes and flat screen TVs in the stereo shop, and his success is measured by a flashy sports car that competes with the Prozac salesman's. But what, please, has this got to do with Maggie?

Insofar as Love and Other Drugs is a disaster, and its many inconsistencies make it one, that must be attributed to the screenplay produced by Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskov in collusion with the director, Edward Zwick. There are a number of corny rom-com scenes that surely have nothing to do with the book about drug companies bribing doctors and doctors disenchanted with their profession -- and would have nothing to do with a good romantic comedy either. There is the fundamental problem that ultimately the on-and-off romance of Jamie and Maggie trumps the story of the drug business, not only because sentiment takes over but because these two strains never had anything to do with each other to begin with.

If there is a reason to watch this movie, it's Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. Their talents, unfortunately, have been largely wasted. But when Jake and Anne make eyes at each other in big closeups, it's mesmerizing. Movies are a visual medium and the two are a pleasure to look at. Gyllenhaal, though his role has no depth, is literally in fine form here -- shown off in and out of clothes as both buff and cuddly. At thirty, he seems more newly minted than he did as the depressed genius teenager Donnie Darko when he was 21. He's fresh, eager, and energetic in every scene. His energy and looks sell his character even better than Jamie sells Viagra. Hathaway, who played with Jake in Brokeback Mountain, has that alabaster English beauty that's both heartbreaking and triumphant. Her character's feistiness offsets the sentimentality of her pathetic situation. We can believe the energy of their sex. If the movie wasn't so eager to be dirty and funny about sex, it could almost have become a sexual idyll worthy of Henry Miller.

But whatever promise this movie had in the challenge Maggie posed for Jamie, and whatever comic or satirical complexities might have emerged from the Big Pharma story, are plowed under as the movie collapses in a series of increasingly numbing narrative clichés. Viagra deserved better and so did Parkinson's. All of which is more obvious in the wake of Jason Rietman's Up in the Air, whose far superior screenplay did quite successfully blend romance and workplace exposé.

[tabuno]

What's interesting about Chris's commentary here is that his observations seem to be of two minds here, one a big negative about how the movie doesn't size up to the novel upon which it is adapted from and the sparkling positive comments about the Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway themselves in the movie. And based on former, the movie is a disaster for Chris. For me, who hasn't read the book and probably won't, the movie from just a movie perspective turns out much better on its own.

What this movie does for soft porn and love is rather remarkable and it is used to great effect in this comedy turns romantic drama movie. It continues to offer Anne Hathaway a distinctive ability to show her acting range apart from her break out role in The Princess Diaries (2001) and her more popular comedy-drama such as The Devil Wears Prada (2006) that solidified her role as popular and reliable actress. Having already gone serious in Rachel Getting Married (2008) and taking the lead role in the psychological thriller Passengers (2008), Anne Hathaway has a delightful relational role in Love and Other Drugs as a rather eccentric and sometimes literally unhealthy character that offers plenty of sex, particularly in the first half of the movie.

What makes this movie stand out from other comedy-drama-romance movies is its almost seamless and effective use of sex as part of the relational activities in this movie. Unlike the more graphic, visceral and isolated but effective sex scenes of a man’s history comes back to haunt him in A History of Violence (2005) or the period Las Vegas drama in The Cooler (2003), Love and Other Drugs breaks new ground in presenting sex as the legitimate background upon which to present a solid relational themed movie. And unlike the classic relational playfulness of Audrey Hepburn in the classic mystery-thriller Charade (1963), the over the top but hilarious comedic emphasis of Sandra Bullock of All Above Steve (2009), the distant and neglectful male character focus of the haunting relational movie of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s If Only (2004), or the purely comedic but delightful relationship found in Music and Lyrics (2007), the focus on the relationship parallels much more closely the real love life cycle of infatuation and sex towards the more darker, layered, conflicting elements of a deepening relationship along with a fascinating look a marketing drug representative as a love interest.

This movie avoids the harsher look at relationship as in American Beauty (2000) or the stylized over the top but intriguing magical fantasy of the ideal relational entanglements of The Great Gatsby (2013) or bewitching and just as necessarily stylized romantic ideal in contemporary silent movie The Artist (2011). With elements from the romantic drama Sweet November (2001) or even the movie classic Love Story (1970), Love and Other Drugs takes a more layered and uncertain but just as effective path in its storyline. In some ways the story takes a similar track but with more lightness than A Man and A Woman (French, 1966) in its portrayal of a close male-female relationship making this movie a carefully balanced mainstream movie with a distinctive bent for independent realism.