by Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
Anne Hathaway’s spirited performance is the best reason to see “Love and Other Drugs.” Otherwise, the movie, in spite of its multple ambitions, is a mess. Not unlikeable, just unsuccessful.
The beginning is promising. Writer/director Ed Zwick, and his co- screenwriter Charles Randolph, capably sketch a complicated family heavily invested in the medical arts. George Segal and the late Jill Clayburgh appear, happily, as the clan elders. You know right away there’s ample intelligence steering the events, in the writing and performing.
The characters seem part of a well functioning family with ongoing ambivalences to each other and their careers. But the elders are quickly abandoned as the picture settles on the travails of the middle son, Jamie, (Jake Gyllenhall) a med school dropout who seems uncomfortable with both his compliant sister, a doctor, and his younger brother, a successful software entrepreneur.
Zwick understands Jamie’s ambivalence, and his resulting lack of a center. A lengthy sequence that follows the opening, in which Jamie is indoctrinated into the corporate culture of pharmaceutical giant, Phizer, peeks into the workings of a corporate juggernaut with both curiosity and skepticism. At this point the movie plays like a perky satire.
Shortly after he begins a tentative career as a salesman, Jamie is introduced to Maggie, played by Anne Hathaway. They meet cute, in a way that almost guarantees there’ll be sparks between them. And there’s a health issue, which portends trouble. All of this follows a predictable pattern.
But the movie has much more on its mind than the relationship. It wants to talk about business ethics, brotherly disaffection, the introduction of Viagra, and the plight of doctors in the go go world of the mid 90s. Mostly this plays as comedy. But then the problem takes over, and we’re asked to change gears along with the movie.
It’s not that the jumble of elements are at war with each other; it’s just that they fail to reinforce the most important one, the stuff between Jamie and Maggie.
The movie becomes a kind of juggling act, certainly difficult for the editors, that struggles to keep the love story front and center at the same time it wants to satisfy the several constituencies a big movie like this needs to recruit a mass audience.
There’s one more problem, perhaps larger than the many others that nag at you as the story continues to deviate from its center. That is, a lack of real chemistry between the two leads.
I’m going to digress here, because the issue of chemistry is highly subjective. But I think in cases like this, comparisons to other moves can be telling.
Shortly after seeing “Love and Other Drugs,” I happened on a Belgian thriller called “Left Bank,” from 2008, (available on DVD,) that deals with a troubled relationship between two athletes. Never mind that it’s a different genre; the same problem obtains in any romance. Here, a young woman at first resists, then succumbs to the advances of a persistent and seductive male. So we’re not really dealing with apples and oranges.
When they do get around to having sex, fairly early in the story, you can feel the heat between them. There’s real tension in the willing seduction, which is no more or less graphic than what occurs between Hathaway and Gyllenhall. But there’s a big difference, in the portrayal of genuine desire.
It’s largely a matter of direction; how the characters interact, their physical being, and finally where the director has elected to place them in the frame. The director of “Left Bank,” Pieter Van Hees, keeps the camera at just enough distance for us to observe the peculiar body language that makes the attraction between his two lovers so strong. Zwick, for better or worse, has given us glossy close ups that are overly familiar. Yes, body parts are in full view, and they’ve made a big deal in the press about a little bit of skin. But the lighting and rather generic angles are hardly provocative, even as flesh is bared. Sex scenes, at this point in movie history, have to be about more than skin.
Beyond that there are the issues of story. The point is made that when Maggie and Jamie first get together it‘s mainly animal attraction, which is fine. But it doesn’t get much beyond that. The script tries to make more of it. The script harps on the disease and both characters resulting ambivalences. But for a number of reasons, some having to do with the way Jamie is sketched in the beginning, (as a kind of feckless lothario,) you never really see Hathaway surrendering to him. The result is that not much is at stake.
Because she’s got the winning appeal of the young Julia Roberts, who held audiences in thrall for almost two decades, any project with the Ann Hathaway gets our attention. She’s no less potent a star presence here than she’s been in any other of her recent roles. She’s just not enough to make the movie really sing.
Equally comfortable with comedy or drama, Hathaway has the kind of physical magnetism that commands your attention. On top of that she can act. You’re always wondering what part of her psyche she’s going to dredge up next. But she easily overpowers men who aren’t as strong in their own way.
Gyllenhall has charm and looks. But with this material he comes up short. The easy outs the script has given his character ultimately fail both the actor and the movie.
But it isn’t entirely his fault. Hathaway is so resourceful she’s become a formidable challenge to both sexes. We saw that in the terrific “My Sister’s Wedding”, where she made the rest of the cast, with the exception of Meryll Streep, almost disappear. Here, there just isn’t enough solid material to create the kind of tension that forces us to care.
I Love You, Phillip Morris
At this point in his career who would have expected Jim Carrey to play a blatantly gay con artist, a character modeled after a real person, who, at this moment is serving a life sentence in federal prison.
Even when Carrey has gone out on a limb, in performances that put him in a special category, a third sex, which resists the more conventional categories, you can’t imagine him as an aggressive homosexual. He mostly seems more interested in being nuts than actively sexual. But here he is, in “ I Love You, Phillip Morris,” aggressively gay. And there’s no mistaking the drive that moves him in any number of close encounters with Ewan McGregor, the object of his affection. For most of the movie’s running time, it’s right in your face.
The movie starts rough, because its makers, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, have trouble establishing a consistent tone for their unlikely, but largely true story. Playing a brilliant but disturbed sociopath, Carrey begins large and is matched by the movies sledgehammer style.
But for those who can accept the way the character goes from straight to gay, and from honest to pathologically dishonest, the movie pays off. Here, the story finally wins us over, as insane as it seems on the surface. After a while, the well rigged plot devices overwhelm us because Carrey’s character has a center, and an unquenchable thirst that persists, in spite of our initial instinct to resist it.
This is a case where more, instead of less, finally wins out. The several turnarounds, one in particular regarding fatal illness, wrest us from any lethargy induced by clumsy filmmaking in the first half hour. It’s a shame it’s taken almost two years for this film to get into any kind of release. It’s an oddly chaotic, but frequently hilarious tall tale, that luckily for us, happens to be true.
