By I think Edward Zwick (and the other writers, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz) made this movie all wrong. The backbone of the story is the main romance, with an underlying subplot about Viagra and the pharmaceutical industry, and Love and Other Drugs could have been far better if these plotlines were switched with their roles of importance. The fact that the film is based on Jamie Reidy’s novel, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, makes me think my hunch is right, and that they changed too much of the book. In my review I’ll be exploring the many reasons why I think this movie failed for this and many other reasons.
I think Edward Zwick (and the other writers, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz) made this movie all wrong. The backbone of the story is the main romance, with an underlying subplot about Viagra and the pharmaceutical industry, and Love and Other Drugs could have been far better if these plotlines were switched with their roles of importance. The fact that the film is based on Jamie Reidy's novel, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, makes me think my hunch is right, and that they changed too much of the book. In my review I’ll be exploring the many reasons why I think this movie failed for this and many other reasons.{{page_break}}
Love and Other Drugs is blunt about the roles the two leads play, and instead of showing us their purposes it actually comes out and tells us: Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a “shithead”, and Maggie (Anne Hathaway) is afraid of having a relationship. The first problem is that Gyllenhaal isn’t the right person to cast as a shithead just because he has muscles now, and he wasn’t capable of taking on this new direction in his career, nor should he have accepted it in my opinion. As for Hathaway, she actually starts off strong with lots of affective medication scenes, and you do believe she’s only dating him because she expects he’s not capable of winning her love, but then in a blink of an eye she breaks all her own rules and quickly devolves into being nothing more than a pair of boobs who suffers from Parkinson’s disease.
The rest of the movie bounces back and forth from Jamie’s pharmaceutical career scenes to their relationship scenes as she starts to suffer from more and more disease symptoms. As I’ve said in past reviews, having one of the main characters verbally point out all the stupid romance clichés doesn’t excuse them from going on to partake in all of them anyways. Hathaway doesn’t come off as witty or strong like she’s meant to be, and because of that we get bored and start to think about all the other flaws: where are her parents, she’s honestly not that good of an artist anyways, that we are still surprised Hathaway wasn’t even introduced until twenty minutes into the movie, and the list goes on.
There were only two scenes that weren’t flawed or mediocre, and they both felt so out of place in this movie that I fully believe that if this film was like The Social Network but about the birth of Viagra instead of the birth of Facebook, that this could have been such a better movie. The first great scene was a montage of how the pharmaceutical drug rep industry actually works, with the training camp and graduation all being covered over a few vastly interesting minutes while the movie continued to not introduce Hathaway. This whole microcosm concept should have been the backbone of the movie, and would have much better fleshed out Jamie as a shithead instead of quickly pushing us through a few scenes that indicate he is.
The second great scene was when Maggie follows Jamie to an industry convention only to find there’s a Parkinson’s meeting, which she sits in on to see a group of probably real life sufferers vent and joke about their disease. While this goes on Jamie is in the other room hearing a husband of a victim painfully tell him all the reasons why he should break off his relationship before he ties the knot.
Both of these scenes were so damn good that they completely overshadowed the other hour and a half of the film by far. If Jamie’s climb through the fascinatingly "shithead” producing pharmaceutical industry was the main arc, it would have allowed Hathaway’s simple character to have been a nice bonus to a good movie instead of a major reason why Love and Other Drugs is a bad movie. Or, stick with the current setup and make your characters more interesting than “shithead” and “boobs with a disease.” Your pick, Zwick.
In the movie’s defense, one of my biggest gripes about the film industry is how many movies focus on sex even though few of them have the guts to actually show the sex in a meaningful way, so to have lots of nudity in a movie that calls for it is refreshing, but it doesn’t hide the fact that this movie is just a big mess. The last major complaint worth making is that most of the emotional scenes with tears didn’t affect me at all, but the director shares the blame with the actors for rushing the changes in their relationship; it's never believable that they're actually in full-blown love.
The brother was an okay supporting character, but even when he says some key pieces of dialogue we don’t see the director doing his job to add emphasis to his words. It’s definitely not what I’ve come to expect from the guy who worked on Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, and Quarterlife. The doctor – who actually did feel like a shithead – was pretty good in his support role as the shady side of the industry, but again, this could have been elevated to a great character in the other version of this movie I wish I could have seen.
Overall Score: 5.65 – Bad. (5s are movies that either failed at reaching the goals it set out to do, or didn’t set out to do anything special and still had many flaws. Some will enjoy 5s, but unless you’re a fan of this genre, you shouldn’t see it, and might not even want to rent it.)
Glenn Morris:
Overall Score: 4.15 — We’re given glimpses of how good Anne Hathaway is getting as an actress, but this film throws away every piece of quality it has by switching erratically between college humor, heavy moralizing, upbeat party, and thorny roses. Nothing ever comes together the way it should, and as a result the film is insulting to women, men, Parkinson’s patients and any serious understanding of romance buried somewhere in the audience. You can read his full review here!
Siobhan Watters:
Overall Score: 6.85 — Zwick has infused the tired romance model with a little originality and a lot of masculine appeal. Love and Other Drugs succeeds because of it’s good-intentioned message, charismatic leads, and overall polish, but Hathaway deserved more of a starring role than she's been given. You can read her full review here!