Film

Movie review: ‘Love and Other Drugs’

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Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal lie around naked in Love and Other Drugs

The Details

Love and Other Drugs
three stars
Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Oliver Platt
Directed by Edward Zwick
Rated R.
Beyond the Weekly
Official movie site
IMDb: Love and Other Drugs
Rotten Tomatoes: Faster

After years spent making self-serious historical and/or social-issue dramas (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond, Courage Under Fire, etc.), Edward Zwick has finally directed a movie that mirrors the kind of earnest relationship stories he’s known for producing on TV in shows like Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. Love and Other Drugs plays like a movie version of one of those shows, with natural, flawed characters in a believable relationship. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a charismatic, womanizing pharmaceutical rep in the Midwest in the late 1990s, just as Viagra is being introduced. As his career takes off, he finds himself falling in love with a quirky artist (Hathaway) who’s suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The early courtship scenes have a wonderful unforced chemistry, and Oliver Platt provides nice comic relief as a fellow Viagra salesman. The illness-related tragedy eventually tips the movie too far into melodrama, but for a while it’s an effective antidote to the bloated seriousness of Zwick’s past films.

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