Note to filmmakers: If you want me to almost instantly hate your movie, go ahead and begin with the Spin Doctors‘ ubiquitous song Two Princes from over a decade ago. Yes, Love and Other Drugs is a “period piece” set in the late 1990s in the background as the direct-to-consumer pharmaceuitical business starts booming with the development of wonderdrugs to treat everything from depression to male … specific problems.
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Jamie Randall, a smooth-talking salesman who is likely to talk his way into your pants while buying a stereo (well, not my pants but still). In an effort to prove his worth to his medical-oriented family, Jamie takes a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep for Pfizer. In his travels shadowing Dr. Stan Knight (Hank Azaria), Jamie meets Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a young woman who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Maggie is your typical romantic comedy outcast with her art and proclivity for casual sex. However Jamie is further attracted to her after his initial rejection and their once apprehensive relationship blossoms into … do I really need to finish the rest of the recap?
Co-writer and director Edward Zwick has had some success in the past with award-winning Glory and Blood Diamond but there is nothing in L&OD (too lazy to type it all out, sorry) that you have not seen in another relationship movie, sans the Parkinson’s aspect. As such, it is not a bad movie but completely forgettable by the time you have finished watching. If someone made a MadLibs for romantic comedies, this movie with fit it with a T (the primary reason I don’t like these movies anyways). You have the jerky, self-involved guy who comes around to responsibility and love, the free-spirit who cannot commit to a relationship, the plucky character for comic relief, and a life-altering event that makes the previously jerky guy come chasing after his love and professes his desires in a cliched conversation just before the closing credits. Replace Maggie’s Parkinson’s with leprosy or a club foot and the outcome of the movie does not change.
Gyllenhaal and Hathway perform well with the stock characters that they are given and I must admit to liking the budding stages of their relationship as they have a playful banter between them. There are some laughs as well, mostly centering around the leads’ sexual behavior and Jamie’s new toy to sell: Viagra. Azaria is woefully underused however as his comedic chops are diluted to lusting after women and the “little blue pill” to compensate for his lack of drive professionally. Hands down the most annoying part of the movie (other than the sheer predictability of it all) was Josh Gad as Jamie’s brother who is apparently rich from developing medical software, yet sleeps on Jamie’s couch for some glossed-over reason. His character was the aforementioned plucky comic relief guy but as a cross between Jonah Hill and a really annoying asshole, Josh (the character, not the actor) added absolutely nothing to this movie already bereft of ideas. Although, I did want to punch him repeatedly in the gonads while he was on screen so I guess that was different than a typical movie.
Given the heaviness of the story around Maggie’s medical condition, one would expect that a movie centering around how a person lives in such shape would address the notion of how that affects the relationship in question. While the spouse of a Parkinson’s sufferer gives Jamie the idea that it is a life of misery and he is best to walk away, we never really see how her affliction impacts the relationship as she is still in the early stage of the disease. The characters follow all the standard trappings of such a movie and at the end, it is implied that he accepts her no matter what will come, thus robbing the story of any real weight that it might have had if we followed them down their long, strenuous journey ahead. In short, it’s a cop out of an ending but I would suppose that fits the movie just fine.
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