Big Screen Peter: Love & Other Drugs

Editor’s note: Peter Lewis has agreed to use whatever it is you call his writing style to provide some measure of analysis to those folks who still go to a theater to see a movie.

review by Peter Lewis

“Love & Other Drugs” opens with a pepped up scene featuring the story’s main protagonist, Jamie Randall (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), dancing around with different women, flirting heavily with them to sell high-end electronic equipment.

From boom boxes and discmans to big-screen televisions and surround sound, we’re meant to see that there’s nothing in the store this man can’t sell you. That is until Jamie takes it one step too far by enacting a stockroom union with the wife of his boss. The opening montage ends with Jamie taking off down the street at a sprint, jobless but content with his phallocentric antics.

Following this, the audience is treated to a narrative fly-by via a scene featuring a family dinner at the Randall household. Here we get to see just how dysfunctional and tawdry life really is in the posh confines of the Chicagoan well-to-do. With his sister and father bickering over their relative impact on society, Jamie sits passively in a chair, seemingly lost in his own existential crisis.

It is amongst this garbled, frenetic set of images that the audience is prepped with the “groundwork” for the forthcoming film. The basis of which revolves around this seemingly empty shell of a man, Jamey Randall.

And despite their ineffectual efforts, it still almost works. Gyllenhaal has that charming smile that can win over any cold heart and make any cynical reviewer suspend criticism in a vain hope for improvement. Instead, Jamey runs off to Pfizer school, content to continue in his dual pursuit of the fabled El Dorado of all empty men: cold cash and warm women.

It is in his eternal trolling for success and sex that he crosses path with Maggie Murdock, a brashly confident and undeniably sexy spirit who also happens to be stricken with Parkinson’s Disease.

From this chance encounter, Jamey and Maggie (played wonderfully by Anne Hathaway) enter into a relationship based almost solely on their sexual connection. With their dual disdain for emotional reality, their relationship slowly morphs from no-strings to one truly resembling what one may call a courtship of sorts. To say that what follows is an exercise in obviousness is a mild understatement. From one scene to the next, the entire movie seems to be spelled out strictly in an attempt to attract via romantic melodrama. It’s cookie-cutter romance. It’s paint-by-numbers love.

Unlike many other modern romance films, however, “Love & Other Drugs” does not shy away from the reality of sex. The filmmakers seem to revel in portraying America’s erstwhile innocent sweetheart in all manner of positions, from alluring repose to prancing about the bedroom bare-chested.

And as ill-fitting as the rest of the movie is, it’s in this reality that “Love & Other Drugs” finds its only semblance of success. Which is both a damning criticism of the film itself and a glowing review of Hathaway’s undeniable drawing power on the screen. Going forward, one can only hope this darling of the silver screen is allowed a more complete script to better broadcast her obvious talents.

And yes, that is a double entendre.

• Love & Other Drugs is playing at the Carmike 14 and the Malco Cinema 12 in Fort Smith, and the Malco Van Buren Cinema. Link here for time and ticket info.

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