Hard-Won Love Knots

 Love and Other Drugs

Directed by Edward Zwick

Runtime: 113 min.

Bryan Ferry’s classic Roxy Music song “Love Is the Drug” (if you don’t love it, you don’t love pop) used irony to admit his romantic obsession and bring it up to date with 1970s drug culture. Director Ed Zwick must not love pop because his movie Love and Other Drugs doesn’t take love as seriously as Ferry. Zwick’s drug metaphor makes a blatant, unironic literalization of love and drugs as placebo.

This love story between Maggie (Anne Hathaway), an artist suffering from early onset of Parkinson’s Disease, and Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cynical medical supplies salesman, combines romcom sarcasm with TV’s disease-of-the-week pathos. Zwick’s bizarre concoction fakes insight about sex, biology and social criticism about medicine and business, yet it’s really aggressively sentimental on every level.

After one of the film’s many flagrant sex scenes, Hathaway looks at Gyllenhaal and asks, “What are you thinking about?” He grins and answers, “Money.” The point could be their lack of an intimate connection, but Zwick’s emphasis is mistimed. Gyllenhaal’s self-satisfied response triggers a chuckle like one of those snarky George Clooney lines in Up in the Air. Full of similar banter, Love and Other Drugs is disingenuously raunchy and condescending.

Zwick plays smart and smug. He chronicles the contemporary sexual license of females who lust as openly as males (“Squeeze my nipple!” a woman instructs Jamie during an impromptu humping in a storage room); confronts the difficulty of living with illness; then reveals the commonplace venality of business practices from pharmaceutical companies to doctors’ offices and medical conventions. This pseudo exposé does little more than seek plaudits for “honesty.” It is the film equivalent of New Yorker magazine short fiction that prides itself on being sophisticated about complicated life matters. (Jamie is told: “This isn’t a disease, it’s a Russian novel!”) Bourgeois sentimentality in cornball Hollywood packaging, Love and Other Drugs fails to honestly adduce sexual mores. The complications of emotional candor and its reflection in social and professional behavior were better detailed in Zwick’s very fine thirtysomething TV series, but when this film’s supercompressed narrative attempts shifting into romantic intensity, it just feels like plot manipulation. Maggie and Jamie’s smiley egotism makes them worse than unlikable; they’re barely recognizable as real people. Their idiosyncrasies—from Maggie’s lack of a family background and her magnanimous work with senior citizens to Jamie rejecting his affluent family heritage then mastering both salesmanship and cocksmanship—are too cute. When they finally confess vulnerability, that’s too cute, too.

“You are my little blue pill,” Jamie boasts to Maggie when their physical rapport parallels his success at hawking Viagra. Then Maggie warns her stud salesman about her upcoming tragedy: “You might have some kind of latent humanity.” This TV-glib dialogue is at odds with the film’s sexual blatancy— movies from Last Tango in Paris to Chaos

Theory and London lead us to expect more. Gyllenhaal and Hathaway’s physical nudity lacks a corresponding emotional transparency—and a scene where she achieves orgasm and simultaneous loss of muscular control is just gruesome. Then the lovers attend a Parkinson’s “Unconvention,” where presumably reallife patients perform stand-up comedy routines about their life frustrations—a mini epic of mawkishness.

Whatever irony Zwick intends from contrasting the dubious wonders of medicine with the limits of human capacity gets confused in the tallying-up of our era’s Internet porn, homemade sex tapes, naked coupling and blunt talk that equalizes sex and drugs and money. A long way from Roxy Music’s profound romanticism, Love and Other Drugs turns sexual frankness into sitcom trash.