Love & Other Drugs (**)

This is about as disjointed as you might expect from a romantic comedy-drama adapted from a non-fiction book about a pharmaceutical rep. (This explains why the movie is set in 1996.) Jake Gyllenhaal plays the rep, Jamie. Jamie is very desirable to women, as we can tell from a series of overdone scenes of women yelling phone numbers, offering up casual threesomes, and swooning at the most obvious pick-up lines he offers. But even a young stud must make a living, and so Jamie gets a job in the glamorous world of pharmaceutical sales. After just six weeks of training, he’s a “fully qualified health care professional” assigned to convince, cajole, and sometimes bribe doctors into prescribing one depression drug versus the other. This early section of the movie is clearly the one from the book. Sleeping with the staff, as (fictional) Jamie does, or even tossing out the competitors samples, as he also does, might not be in every rep’s bag of tricks, but the sweet-talking of the receptionist, the free sports tickets, the invitations to medical conferences in Hawaii, and the parking-lot approaches to recalcitrant doctors were certainly standard practices in the 1990s. (Some of the more obvious bribery has been curtailed since then.)

But then Jamie meets Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a patient with early-onset Parkinson’s and a fear of commitment, and the movie enters romantic-comedy territory before again transitioning into a “poignant” third act. Watching this, in which the raunchiness merely seems crass, the sex scenes redundant, and the transition from comic to serious anything but fluid, makes you appreciate the gifts of Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), who juggles the same elements in a way that seems more natural and much cleverer.

The pharmaceutical industry exposé, such as it is, is oddly done. For anyone paying the slightest bit of attention, the influence of salesmanship and other non-medical considerations on doctors’ prescribing habits should be obvious, and Zwick even has Maggie taking old folks on drug-buying runs to Canada, yet at no point does anyone actually say anything bad (or good, for that matter) about the pharmaceutical industry or the health-care system of which it is a part, or suggest that any ethical issues might be raised by elevating the profit motive so high. I have the suspicion that the real-life drug company’s approval was sought in the making of the movie. (The real Jamie got fired after his book was published.)

As much as I enjoyed Hathaway’s multiple nude scenes, they put me in mind of the Deana Carter album title Did I Shave My Legs for This? I think Anne might one day write something called Did I Show My Tits for This?

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East [PFS screening] 9/29/10 and reviewed 9/29/10 (revised 11/17/10)