Affecting, But So Erratic

Edward Zwick’s “Love and Other Drugs� can’t decide if it’s social satire, tearjerker romance or a frat boy romp.

   Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the ne’er-do-well son of a wealthy Chicago

family. His slob of a brother is rich through an IPO and therefore acceptable to the family, but the lady-killing Jamie drifts from

crummy job to crummy job, existing primarily on sex.

   There is a lot of sex in this film. Be forewarned. Jamie takes a job as a drug rep for Pfizer, and meets Maggie (Anne Hathaway) — the young and beautiful sufferer of Parkinson’s.

   Jamie is very taken with Maggie but she keeps shoving him off — while

being perfectly willing to have sex with him.

   Meanwhile Jamie’s rich doofus brother Josh (Josh Gad) has been kicked

out by his wife and is sleeping on Jamie’s couch.

   Enter Viagra.

   Jamie’s selling abilities have been adequate, but with the miracle of

Viagra stiffening his product line, he really hits it big. And he falls in love with Maggie, who falls in love with him but

shoves him away because of the Parkinson’s.

   Here’s the problem with “Love and Other Drugs.â€� It lurches awkwardly,

between semi-intelligent dialogue between Maggie and Jamie, to masturbation jokes, to satirical put-downs of the pharmaceutical industry, to a “pajama party� (aka orgy) scene containing a dissertation on the woes of modern medicine, to a sustained and prolonged erection joke, to a poignant scene with Maggie attempting to open her pill bottle, only to find it empty. The whole film has these abrupt transitions in mood. It makes me wonder if it was written by three different people and glued together.

   (There is circumstantial evidence for this theory in the three writing

credits: director Zwick and two others on the screenplay, based on

Jamie Reidy’s “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman.�)

   The satire is broad and not especially memorable.Do they really have big Pfizer pep rallies with dancing girls and stuff?

   The frat boy bits could have been sustained for hours — but after two

and half you’d need medical attention. And, unfortunately, the lovey-dovey material, which wasn’t horrible, gets lost. (I am an avowed opponent of the lovey and the dovey; this is high praise.)

   Parkinson’s is an awful disease. The idea of two young successful people, one of them ill, going ahead with their romance knowing full well what’s in store for them has legs.

   The remainder of “Love and Other Drugsâ€� is pretty limp. But for anyone who was a young adult in the late 1990s, the music should be evocative.

   

   “Love and Other Drugsâ€� is rated R for strong sexual material, nudity, pervasive language and some drug material. It is playing widely.

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