Review of Love & Other Drugs (2010) by Shiira — 10 Dec 2010

Remember the commercials for Reeces Peanut Butter Cups(circa late-seventies) that ran on those long ago Saturday mornings in between the bad Hanna-Barbara cartoons, the ones which accentuated the recombination of peanut butter and chocolate like it was an alchemy for the ages? The two advocates for their respective goodies would bump into each other, then with mock outrage, offer up this exchange: "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter," and so on.

"Love and Other Drugs", adapted from the Jamie Reidy memoir "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" is kind of like a Reeces Peanut Butter Cup; it's a mishmash of seemingly disparate ingredients, in which raunchy drollery collides with earnest histrionics, all under a timeshare tent pole that also houses social satire and romantic comedy to boot.

At one end of the filmic spectrum, you have a scene where Jamie(Jake Gylenhaal), a pharmaceutical salesman with a "swinging d*ck", catching his younger brother Josh(Josh Gad) in the middle of some sexy "me time" with a a naughty video that the Phizer rep had made with his Parkinson's-riddled girlfriend Maggie(Anne Hathaway).

And on the other end, you have the sequence in which the Stage One beauty discovers other Parkinson's survivors at a smaller convention, an encounter group, really, across the street from the official event she was attending with Jamie.

The heartfelt testimonies, both funny and poignant, delivered by those afflicted with the degenerative disorder(that wrecks havoc on the central nervous system), deserve to be in a that deals with the illness on a full-time basis.

Jamie, an agent for both the "peanut butter" and the "chocolate", is employed by the filmmaker extemporaneously to point out this imperfect fit, when the salesman(lacking the proper gravitas, as does this atonal film) chooses not to take a seat alongside Maggie, while the weightiness of the mass catharsis plays out.

How can we take Jamie seriously after watching him with Josh? Back in the convention hall, Jamie bides his time at the refreshment table, the husband of a Stage Four patient confronts the partner in crime(peanut butter role)/sick girl's rock(chocolate role) with the lowdown on what to expect in the not-too-distant future.

The husband likens the effects of the disease to a Russian novel. It's this forewarning, so full of tortured, unflinchingly honest words about the limits to love, which renders the climax, typical of all romantic comedies, where the man declares his love in some overdramatic and self-deprecating fashion, usually in public(thankfully, Maggie drives, not flies to Canada: no airports), as being even more factitious than normal.

Inspired by Maggie's videotaped drivel, Jamie knows! JUST KNOWS!!! Maggie is the one, prompting Jamie to burn rubber on the freeway so he can flag down the bus. Showing more restraint than most, Jamie coaxes Maggie off the bus, out of earshot from the other passengers, before he tears into his overblown speech, the kind that typifies the rom-com genre, which is supposed to leave not a dry eye in the house.

Sometimes it works(Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything"), sometimes it doesn't(every movie since), as in the case here. While Jamie summarizes the notion that they should live for today in a language that Tarzan would understand("You.

Us. This."), the laundry list of Parkinson's-related complications conveyed by the exhausted husband at the drug summit, systematically kills the fantasy of unconditional love that these rom-coms peddle on the moviegoers.

As a result of the film's unexpected detour into docu-drama(the "Un-Convention" sequence recalls Todd Haynes' "Safe"), the happy-ever-after fallacy seems all the more naive. Worst of all, Jamie quits Phizer and applies to med school, which implies that Jamie will concoct the pill that will cure the disease.

"Love and Other Drugs" shamelessly co-opts the disease as a vehicle to redeem an incorrigible p*ssy hound. Anne Hathaway almost makes this film work in spite of itself.