Love and Other Drugs (Edward Zwick, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Tyler Gilbert. Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, AFI Film Festival, Hollywood.

Love and Other Drugs World Premiered at Grauman’s Chinese theatre on the evening of Thursday, November 4 to a vast crowd of enthusiastic filmgoers eager to kick-start this year’s AFI Film Festival, presented by Audi. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway in startlingly intimate roles, the film opened with high audience expectations and closed with some mixed signals. Gyllenhaal portrays a charismatic socialite, Jamie Randall with seemingly nowhere to go. Fired from his job at the “high-end” electronics store, Jamie looks in a different direction and discovers the potential of door-to-door drug marketing. Lost in the disappointment of failure and the heat of competition, Jamie begins to realize that success may be won by employing one of his greatest skills: flirtation. Always a charmer, Jamie meets and sleeps with many women who bring him to a thin line of success. Eventually his charm and career in the medical field leads him to Maggie Murdock, a lonely artist with stage-one Parkinson’s, with whom he forms what begins as a purely sexual relationship but grows into much more. Love and Other Drugs is not your typical rom-com: flavored with what some thought was too explicit sex, the film takes you not only through the realm of emotional interchange, but also intense sensual lust and a man’s desire to cure the only woman he ever loved. Punctuated by hysterical situations and characters on the surface, the film conceals a passionate appreciation for difficult relationships.

The film is constructed through Jamie’s point of view, and therefore created some dispute as to how women were represented. Because we see the Jamie has sex with at least four different women in the film, women appear to be objectified by the men. There certainly is a conflict regarding Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” throughout the film after Jamie and his associate stare at Maggie’s breast in the doctor’s office. Jamie is largely viewed as a pretty base character with low morals and an extreme craving for sex. It even seems like his relationship with Maggie is merely based on sex, and nothing else, but it can be argued that because we only see the story through Jamie’s point of view, we are missing the entire emotional element that is Maggie. I would argue that the film spends so much time showing Jamie’s sex life, that there isn’t enough room to deliberate on the serious relationship forming between Jamie and Maggie.

The film broke some boundaries by offering a different spin on the romantic comedy, but it may have done so a bit forcefully. Perhaps it would have done well to call the film “Sex and Other Drugs” because the audience walked away feeling little love.