Film Reviews

Love And Other Drugs

• Rating:
• Director: Edward Zwick
• Starring: Anne Hathaway
• Details: US / 112mins (15A).

After the downbeat Defiance and Blood Diamond, director Edward Zwick returns with an off beam romantic comedy. Sexy, witty and sometimes a little gloomy, Love And Other Drugs raises some interesting points one wouldn't find in a rom-com.
It's 1995 and Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal) is an expert technology salesman, hawking CD and DVD players to customers at will; he's a cool, confident and suave salesman who even has time for a tryst with a fellow worker in the stockroom. Unfortunately for Jamie, that co-worker happens to be his manager's girlfriend and when he's fired, Jamie takes his skills on the road for drug company Pfizer, just as Viagra hits the shelves. It's here that he runs into artist Maggie (Hathaway), a Stage One Parkinson's sufferer. Maggie is a sexpot, keeping men at arm's length emotionally, as she fears they will run a mile the second her disease becomes difficult. No strings sex suits Jamie down to the ground... until he balks on the promise he makes to her and falls in love.
Although refreshing in raising the points of the cynical nature of pharmaceutical companies, erectile dysfunction and living with someone who has Parkinson's, Love And Other Drugs sadly tends to skim the surface of these and refuses to get under its fingernails (it is selling a romantic comedy after all). However, there is one particular biting scene where Gyllenhaal meets the husband of Parkinson's sufferer who begs him to really think what he's getting into – the husband says he loves his wife but if he had to do it again he wouldn't. Gyllenhaal is left to really question if he loves Hathaway enough to see it through. It's a cold scene, but it's real, believable and human – brave scenes like these, scenes that endanger the audience's sympathy for the hero, don't usually crop in romantic comedies where everyone is usually perfect Dudley Do-Rights.
Gyllenhaal and Hathaway exhibit a remarkable sexual chemistry (it helps when the two are in various states on undress for a lot of the running time), something that was kept at bay (albeit deliberately) when they played a married couple in 2005's Brokeback Mountain. It's fun watching these two pretend they are not falling in love despite their best efforts. Their dialogue – Zwick adapted the screenplay from Jamie Reidy's novel with Charles Randolph (The Interpreter, The Life Of David Gale) and Marshall Herskovitz (who is well-versed in teasing out real moments in relationships after his stint on 80s drama series thirtysomething) – is sharp in its observation of real people and relationships.
Love and Other Drugs can get a little cheesy towards the close but by that stage the audience should be on board.

Review by Gavin Burke