Grade: F
When watching a romantic comedy, I don’t expect a lot. If I laugh a few times, if I liked the main character enough, and maybe if it has some good music in it, I’ll probably be content. No, the genre isn’t high art, but once in a while you’ll get something really worthwhile that does something new and exciting with the formulaic.
“Love and Other Drugs” is not that movie.
In fact, “Love and Other Drugs” is about as far from a worthwhile romantic comedy as you can possibly imagine. It is a soulless, brainless and purposeless exercise in masochism, a crime against your intelligence and your time, as I can assure you that you can see something, anything at all, that is better than this.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, you would expect the ensuing product to be at least passable — I know I did. Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, the supposedly intelligent playboy who spends most of his time using his manhood over his mind, though no less than three different characters state how much more he’s capable of. Somehow, this is supposed to endear him to the audience and excuse his debauchery. Jamie decides he ought to become a pharmaceutical representative and use his charms for benefits outside the bedroom. In doing this, he stumbles upon Hathaway’s Parkinson’s-afflicted Maggie Murdock, billed in the film’s summary as “an alluring free spirit who won’t let anyone — or anything — tie her down.” Oh boy…
Jamie and Maggie don’t get along at first (he walks in on her in the middle of a breast exam), but by some miracle of man they manage to find a relationship and holy gosh are we all worse off for it. What follows is a two-hour back and forth of full-frontal sex and smut choreographed under the guise of edgy but coming off as immaturely unnecessary and a bizarre, terrible script that make Jamie and Maggie seem about as authentic as the film’s effort to set the story in 1996.
Why 1996? Because Viagra was invented — Jamie needs a way to succeed, so he starts to sell Viagra. Watching the movie you’d never know the film took place in 1996 save for the occasional big phone or the “Oh, haha, what a silly looking computer” sort of humor spread throughout.
Sex, nudity, coarse language, horrific dialogue and a story that seems to exist solely for Jamie and Maggie to keep having sex, you wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking that perhaps “Love and Other Drugs” would be more appropriately billed as a high-production “adult” film, though I hesitate to sully the adult film genre by doing so.
All this, though, isn’t offensive — it’s merely terrible film making. Where the film crosses the line towards the tasteless is how it tries to use Maggie’s Parkinson’s as a means of creating sympathy. In one segment she attends a convention with another Parkinson’s patient, and together they humorously discuss their struggles with the disease. Instead of courting sympathy for Maggie, it highlights how awful Anne Hathaway is at playing her. She goes so over the top with Maggie’s deterioration into the disease that she may as well have actually been in the theater with me hitting me over the head with a sign that said “Feel sorry for me!” No, I will not.
This is all in addition to the wildly unfounded criticisms the film makes against the entirety of the medical industry, with every doctor played as a chauvinist doing breast exams so he can cop a feel now and then.
All of this adds up to a film that will assault your sense of good taste, your reasoning and your good judgment for what a film should and should not be. “Love and Other Drugs” is a catastrophe in every sense of the word, a truly heartless film bankrupt of even a modicum of quality. It impassioned me like few other films have this year in a way where I feel compelled not to tell you but to warn you: stay away. For all that is good, choose to see a film like “Morning Glory,” a great little romantic comedy with good characters, a good story and real commentary about a real industry. Don’t see this. You’re better than this. We are all better than this, and we should never have to settle for a film as bad as “Love and Other Drugs”.
Contact the critic at vburnton@asu.edu
