Extraneous Raunch And Viagra Weakens The Charming Romance In Love & Other Drugs

Back in the late 2000's, specifically around 2009 through 2011, the American romantic comedy took a detour into the raunchy and R-rated. It's not like no film in the subgenre had gone to such terrain before, but the likes of The Ugly Truth, Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached decided to unleash more nudity and F-bombs in the world of romantic comedies in order to entice moviegoers and keep things fresh (a friend of mine smartly pointed out how this trend was also likely a response to Judd Apatow's mid-2000's R-rated comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up which had major romantic components to them). Ironically, the most financially lucrative romantic-comedy from this epoch was the PG-13 feature The Proposal!


One such entry into this romantic-comedy trend was Love & Other Drugs, which leans more heavily on dramatic material than a number of other films in this era but still handily qualifies as a romantic-comedy. It too embraces more explicit depictions of sexuality which is kind of necessary since it's about the guy who helped make Viagra a hugely renowned pharmaceutical entity. That guy who did just that is Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal), a dude who, before he helped shill for Viagra, was a sales rep for Zoloft whose attempts to woo doctors to use his product intersected his life with Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a 26-year-old woman with Stage 1 Parkinson's Disease.

The two get off to a rocky start but Jamie manages to coerce her into meeting for coffee that ends abruptly when Maggie suggests they should just sleep together as a way for each of them to escape the pain of their existences. That suits Jamie just fine and the two soon spend multiple nights engaging in hanky panky. This dovetails into them developing more complex feelings for each other just as Jamie's selling of Viagra makes him a big deal in his career. Complications are gonna arise and the two's relationship might not survive Jamie's career aspirations and his desire to cure Maggie of her Parkinson's.

Love & Other Drugs really does excel when it just goes for the simple pleasures if you ask me. There are few things in the world of cinema more enticing to watch than well-done scenes depicting two good-looking people engaging in witty banter that occasionally slips in a sexually suggestive double entendre. I'd wager I'm not alone in finding that an entertaining notion and that's probably why romantic comedies have endured as one of the most persistently prominent genres in Hollywood. Thankfully, you do get to see that very element play out quite a few times throughout Love & Other Drugs because Gyllenhaal and Hathaway haven't just been cast in here because they're big names you can slap on the poster, they do actually have strong chemistry in their extended romantic sequences together.

When the movie just lets the two bounce off each other for extended periods of time, it's pretty good actually, ditto for whenever we get to just watch Anne Hathaway's characters plight. She gets this one dialogue-free scene of her trying to open up a medicine bottle while she's alone in her apartment and Hathaway does a fantastic job conveying determination, weariness and pain in the characters struggle to accomplish an everyday task. That's awesome! Problem is though that the movie isn't concentrated on her, too much of it is spent on Jamie Randall. Jake Gyllenhaal makes this character way more likable and naturally charismatic than he would have been in the hands of other actors but his plotline involving the creation and selling of Viagra feels so superfluous to the more compelling romantic and dramatic elements in the story.

The weird dissonance between a more sobering romantic tale and Viagra shenanigans gets seriously emphasized in the third act, where a big break-up scene between Jamie and Maggie is quickly followed up Jamie going to a pajama party where sexual exploits ensue and Jamie, after taking some Viagra, has an erection that lasts too long. Ruh-roh! What follows is wacky hijinks that feel straight out of an American Pie knock-off and have absolutely no bearing on anything else in the plot. Ditto for a similarly out of place scene where Jamie's brother (played by Josh Gad in his pre-Book Of Mormon and pre-Frozen days) gets a hold of his brother's sex tape and pleasures himself to it. I've got no problem with sexually lewd content, but I do have a problem extraneous sexually lewd content that adds nothing to the overall movie. Similarly irrelevant elements are found in underwritten supporting characters played by Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria and Judy Greer. It's a pity that there's so much of this kind of extraneous content in the movie cause the best scenes of Love & Other Drugs (nearly all of which can be chalked up to a strong Anne Hathaway performance) really are engaging and interesting. If there was a drug to help make a movie more consistent in quality and more focused narratively, this movie would need it.