Love & Other Drugs - The other drugs being sex and drugs and money

January 28, 2025

Rating: 2/5

Love & Other Drugs is billed as a romance comedy but it's really a polemic against the U.S. pharmaceutical industry ands its corrupt practices and corrupting influence. As a comedy it is frequently over the top and occasionally gets uncomfortably close to farce and slapstick.

As a romance movie it makes things a bit difficult for itself by depicting essentially all men in the movie as simpleton horndogs (including the male lead) and effectively all women (including the female lead) as interested in only two things: big dongs and fat wallets. While the movie may be right about both sexes it makes it a bit hard to get into romantic vibe.

At the same time, this is a movie that leans heavily on Jake Gyllenhaal as handsome charmer Jamie Randall who gets into pharmaceutical sales to monetize his ability to seduce women, and Anne Hathaway as Maggie Murdock, an artist suffering from early onset Parkinson's disease.

Making the Gyllenhaal and Hathaway pairing the center of the movie is the right choice. This blindingly obvious decision isn't one that is always made. For example, in Fly Me to the Moon the movie largely squanders the Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum pairing to explore the not particularly romantic or interesting question what if the U.S. government had faked faking the 1969 moon landing?

Maggie Murdock has developed unusually deep knowledge about prescription drugs while dealing with her condition, which intrigues Jamie (who is also intrigued by her breasts, the sight of which he is treated to after bribing his way into a doctor's office to peddle prescription drugs).

They rather quickly get it on, because Jamie is a horndog at scale and Maggie is a serial monogamist, perhaps a turbo serial monogamist. Her promiscuity is presented as a consequence of her heroically not wanting to tie down a man to her fate as a person with Parkinson's. Whatever gets you through the day, ma'am.

They move on from getting it on to becoming Friends With Benefits to something beyond that, in spite of Maggie's strict intention to keep it light.

Jamie's career takes off when Pfizer releases Viagra. Overnight he goes from being treated as second-tier in his Pittsburgh-area market to practically a rock star, holding court, handing out samples to those he seeks favors from, and racking up sales.

With the success comes even more opportunity for hedonism and he's forced to make choices about what he can and cannot do, and what he is willing to sacrifice for himself, for Maggie, and their potential relationship.

There is a lot of sex and nudity in the movie. I'm guessing writer and director Edward Zwick figured those ingredients would make what really is a broadside against the pharma industry more palatable to audiences.