It's a cinematic reunion for one of the most frustrated, and frustrating, screen couples in film history.
After smouldering in a firepit of pain and denial as a married couple incapable of true, loving communion in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway offer passionate glances once more, but this time, they're actually looking to seduce each other.
For fans of good-looking people getting jiggy with it on the big screen, that's the good news. The bad news is there are still lots and lots of obstacles standing in the way of passionate abandonment in Love & Other Drugs.
Technically, this makes Edward Zwick's adaptation of Jamie Reidy's Hard Sell a drama, but it's not the darker edges of this romance that give the movie some welcome dimension.
Comedy is the central reason to snuggle up to this youthful, lust-laden saga that balances on a very thin edge of personal sacrifice.
Opening with an uptempo montage that shows our central hero Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal) working in an electronics store selling TVs, phones and quickie encounters with young hotties, we immediately recognize the young Lothario as the cocky guy who gets everything, and everyone, he wants.
Jamie is a nice guy with all the cosmetic gear a man needs, but it's not his sky-blue eyes that make him so attractive. It's the way he moves around his life without baggage that makes him so compelling.
Jamie is one of the lucky few who feels no deep stress or universal angst. He's spiritually weightless, and it's his fairy-like airiness that makes him so seductive -- especially to Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a woman who is all too familiar with the ambient burden of living.
Maggie is an attractive 20-something who works as a collage artist and community organizer. She's very hip, lives in a loft and has a potty mouth that ensures we see her as tough and self-contained.
Jamie and Maggie hit it off immediately, thanks to a big-old boob shot that will make (straight) male moviegoers thankful. They have great sex, and then sink into the consequences of what just happened.
By this point, Jamie has switched careers. From selling stereos, he now sells drugs for Pfizer. Maggie, meanwhile, learns to deal with a debilitating degenerative disorder: She has Parkinson's Disease.
Before you start hearing the strains of Love Story streak through your imagination, remember the comic edge. This movie could have easily drowned in a tub of gooey, romantic sap but, thanks to the addition of side characters that include a dot-com millionaire little brother (Josh Gad) and a morally absent doctor (Hank Azaria), Zwick's little saga keeps bubbling back up to the surface.
There are moments when you can feel the tide pull in for the high-watermark confrontations, and everything gets very messy. Zwick doesn't have the finesse to pull off both sides of the equation -- though he does come very close to finding some romantic fission.
Love & Other Drugs really did have ambitions of being a quiet epic, and attempts to adopt the same textured tone as Jason Reitman's Up in the Air. At one point, when we walk into a Pfizer convention, we can almost feel George Clooney and Vera Farmiga boogieing up behind us with stolen badges.
Zwick tries to match that sense of the surreal by hitching his wagon to the launch of Viagra, but he misses the magic, because he's preoccupied with the balance of empathy, which inevitably forces him to weaken Maggie to make her more sympathetic.
It all starts to feel a little manipulative. Moreover, there's something about the way Hathaway alternately harrumphs and disrobes that starts to make her look a little creepy and unbalanced, even though she's desperate to be strong and grounded.
The movie is saved by good writing and Gyllenhaal's ample magnetism -- as well as an erector-set full of Viagra jokes -- but Love & Other Drugs clearly wanted to be more. It wanted to move us with the immutable beauty of true love. It gets halfway there, but the bulk of this experience is dependent on the pop-culture appeal of a little blue pill.
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