Love and Other Drugs could be filed under romantic-comedy, but for adults. Only for adults. Almost the entire movie has language, sex and nudity (not that it bothered me), but when the story wants to get more serious, it is tough to buy in to. The movie wants to focus on the complexity of relationships, Viagra and the cutthroat business of pharmaceutical sales, and Parkinson’s disease. Sheesh!
Director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, Defiance, The Last Samurai) cannot find stability in all of this and what appears to be a comedy at first, it then tries to turn it in to a heavy drama about a serious disease while still trying to remain a comedy about sex, drugs and commitment. Guess what? It does not work and still ends up following the same pattern as other rom-coms that came before it.
It’s the 90’s and Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is looking in to getting in to the drug business. Jamie is smooth, charming and charismatic and he uses it to get women and sell pharmaceuticals. It starts with Zoloft and once Viagra hits the market, the sky is the limit for Jamie. But his magic ways do not work with Maggie (Anne Hathaway).
She is a free-spirited artist who is not interested in falling in love and being tied-down. She does not bullshit around and Jamie respects that. They are almost the same people with just different body parts. But their emotionless relationship begins to evolve and the exact thing that they were afraid of begins to happen—they start to fall in love.
Love and Other Drugs may be scrambled up as a story but the performances are terrific. Hathaway has the spirit and demeanor to say what she wants and how she feels without thinking twice about it. And portraying a young woman with Parkinson’s disease is a challenge, but she handles it with precision and care. Maggie has good days along with bad ones. As the audience, we get to see a different side of Hathaway and more of her. She bares it all more than a few times and is willing to show some vulnerability and just get naked for all to see.
And her chemistry with Gyllenhaal is undeniable. He is a charismatic and charming guy and he injects all of that in to being Jamie. Just like Hathaway, he goes for it all because usually during sex both people are naked. It takes two to tango. But once Jamie begins to really feel something for Maggie, it scares both of them, but it changes Jamie’s view of himself and how he has been living his life. It is a wake-up call for him.
Honestly, if Hathaway and Gyllenhaal didn’t work well together, Love and Other Drugs would have been quite a mess. But they are talented people who should get a lot of credit for their work here. They carry this movie and maybe it was too much to ask – but they took their characters and made them identifiable and relatable on some level. Unfortunately, what was going on around them was not.
“Nature Boy” Brandon Vick is the resident film critic of the SoBros Network, and star of Brandon’s Box Office In Your Mouth. Follow him on Twitter@SirBrandonV and be sure to search #VicksFlicks for all of his latest movie reviews.
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