Love & Other Drugs Review

Two different films are fighting inside this one and neither wins. The first is a sharp comedy about mid-nineties drug sales culture, with Oliver Platt going bitter in a motel room and Hank Azaria taking lunches from whichever rep brings the best samples, and it carries real information about how prescriptions actually reached patients. The second is a romance between that salesman and a woman with early-onset Parkinson's, and Anne Hathaway plays her without a single bid for sympathy, which is the best thing here.

She and Jake Gyllenhaal are convincing together, in bed and out of it, and Edward Zwick trusts that enough to let scenes run on nothing but talk. Then the third act arrives and flattens both movies. Josh Gad's brother is a crude, shapeless presence dropped in whenever an easy laugh is wanted. Worse, a stranger at a Parkinson's convention tells Jamie plainly to run, in the sharpest scene the script has, and the film immediately argues the opposite with a highway chase and a speech. Something this frank about bodies and money should not finish by asking a bus to pull over.