Love and Other Drugs

Overview

If this film was a drug, you might ask for your money back, but you could just as easily find yourself riding high on the placebo effect. Doling out the thrills are Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, who are so ridiculously likeable and spunky together on screen (it also doesn't hurt that they spend the majority of the film naked), that they make this earnestly vacuous story vaguely palatable. But zoom out just a little, and the thinly sketched characters, muddled tone and shoddy sentimentality belie all the hallmarks of a cheap knock off.

Who would have guessed the story of Viagra would, er, fall so flat? Loosely based on Jamie Riedy's account of life as a drug rep, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, Love and Other Drugs takes us back to the 1990s and the shameless commercialisation of the drug industry. Jamie (Gyllenhaal) is a consummate salesman, chronic under-achiever and complete hound-dog, who loses his job at an electronics store before taking a crack at making some serious cash peddling pharmaceuticals. Jamie's seductive ways are put to good use selling the anti-depressant Zoloft, but when Viagra comes on the market, he really strikes gold. Reminiscent of the 90s Jerry McGuire and last year's Up in The Air, this storyline initially shows a lot of promise.

However, rather than flesh out Jamie's character, or sink their teeth into the pharmaceutical industry Thank You For Smoking style, writer-director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, Glory) and co-writer Charles Randolph instead introduce Maggie (Hathaway), a young, passionate, Parkinson's stricken beauty who calls Jamie on his bullshit and transforms the film into a romantic dramedy. We intuit that Maggie is alternative and zany because she has wild, curly hair, and we meet her asking for Parkinson's medication. But that's about it. Entirely without back-story, Maggie is wholly defined by her disease, her big hair and some vague artistic inclinations. Hathaway ekes an impressive amount of depth from this, but really, she's given precious little to work with.

Just as he skims the surface of the pharmaceutical industry, Zwick doesn't delve beyond midday movie sentimentality in his depiction of a couple facing the realities of Parkinson's. So while watching two beautiful people trade in witty banter and romp around in bed is a diverting way to spend a couple of hours, Love and Other Drugs makes for a disappointingly arduous trip.