LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS

Some of this movie is good. The rest is a complete mess.

Incredibly likable Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Jamie Randall, a perpetual screw-up (or so we’re told) and unapologetic womanizer, who becomes a pharmaceutical rep peddling pills – specifically, Zoloft – to doctors, clinics and hospitals. Equally likable Anne Hathaway co-stars as Maggie Murdock, a ballsy and brash artist (or so it’s implied), who also happens to have Parkinson’s disease. [Relax, that’s not a spoiler: we learn this about two minutes after she appears onscreen and just before she whips out her breast for a completely gratuitous bit of nudity.] Yet, somehow, two such amiable talents still wind up creating a pair of mildly unsympathetic characters around whom this clunky tragi-comedy-romance revolves.

In what becomes a weird and completely unsuccessful hybrid of Up in the Air, Love Story and every Judd Apatow film released in the past five years, Love/Drugs chronicles the pair’s relationship – from the aforementioned topless meet-cute, through lots and lots of sex and, eventually, to the point where each of these no-strings-attached singles has to decide whether they actually want to Get Serious.

Unfortunately for all involved, director Ed Zwick (The Last Samurai) inexplicably peppers what could have been a decent drama with piles and piles of useless, extraneous crap. For starters, there are so many pointless supporting characters – including, but not limited to: George Segal and Jill Clayburgh as Jamie’s one-scene-appearance parents; Hank Azaria as a morally questionable doctor; Gabriel Macht as a pretty-boy competing rep; and, worst of all, Josh Gad as Jamie’s overly horny, wildly inappropriate and waste of screen-time older brother. The film would have been so much better with some of this fat trimmed off. The only supporting player who didn’t annoy me and who served the story was Jamie’s sales partner, Bruce (Oliver Platt).

Yet, for all the extra people, poor Maggie seems to exist in a vacuum. She has no family and no friends to speak of, save for the token gay friend/co-worker, whose sole purpose (and sole line of dialogue) is moving the plot ahead. I understand that Jamie is meant to be the lead character and, thus, his world would take center stage in the narrative, but all it does it make Maggie seem like more of a fabricated character than a real person. (Nevermind the in-the-movies-only loft space in which she lives, complete with exposed plumbing and an open-air bathtub in the middle of it all.)

The story itself has some really lovely moments and some nicely nuanced acting from its two stars when it gets quiet and more serious... but those things are few and far between, and any heartfelt emotion is quickly stomped away by crass, crude “humor” like Jamie suddenly being afflicted with a Viagra-induced erection that won’t go away. Really? Was that sequence, along with all the sex/masturbation jokes and the character of the older brother altogether, dropped in from a different movie? Because it sure feels like they were, especially when juxtaposed with far superior scenes like Maggie’s moving visit to a Parkinson’s lecture, filled with actual Parkinson’s sufferers.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway, who are naked a lot, flounder in the above gunk and, at times, struggle to overcome the flaws of the material with a wry grin or a shed tear. And, to some extent, that works, but it’s not nearly enough to make the resulting film enjoyable or satisfying.