Love & Other Drugs

Lets start off with a few details. This movie is very ADULT. Love is for all the love that takes place (sometimes graphically), and the other drugs are not illegal narcotics, but in fact highly touted pharmaceuticals. Jamie (Gyllenhaal) is a failure in every aspect of life, while is younger, unattractive, fat brother just sold his company for $35m. While not feeling well about his short comings he decides to pick a profession and stick with it. At the point the only thing he has ever been awesome at and consistent at is landing women. Enter drugs: He applies to be a pharmaceutical rep, which basically means he has to try and get the Doctoral community to use his company's drugs rather than someone else's. He sucks at this job too, but he is good with people and since most of the people he needs to get through to in order to get some face time with the high and mighty doctors are women, Well he has a few parlor tricks. Being Mentored by the brilliant Oliver Platt, their conversations alone are quite entertaining. After being constantly shown the door by the "Big Gun" in the medical field (Hank Azaria in a bit of a tone downed role for him), he goes to some desperate measures to get his then wonder drug on the shelves. He works for Pfizer and they are pushing Zoloft to replace Prozac. He schemes and finally gets the Doctor to spend some time with him. In his office he meets Maggie (the very non princess diaries version of Anne Hathaway.) She is a 26 year old in stage one of Parkinson's disease. She lives fast with no attachment. She figures without attachment she cannot be abandoned. She meets her match with Jamie. At first it's a relationship based first on lust, then on his desire of not being rejected. He is not used to women rejecting him and he doesn't know how to deal. He pursues and eventually the lust transforms into something neither of them wanted. As for his work, he basically got his teeth kicked in the entire time he had to sell Zoloft, then it happens.... Viagra is invented by Pfizer and he lobbies to be the lead carrier and distributor of the new wonder drug for his company. He goes from zero to hero over night. He is able to sell the one thing he considers himself an expert at. On the other side Maggie is getting worse. I don't know if worse is the right way to describe it, I think that it may be the first time he has seen her this bad and it scares him. His view towards life changes at the annual Rep Convention in Chicago. Another convention was happening across the street and Maggie sneaks away. It's a Parkinson's convention. People with it tell stories about survival and how to cope/thrive. This is where Jamie asks a question he shouldn't have. I understand why he did. It all comes down to being naive. From this point on the story goes from a sexy fun loving romp to a dark spiralling path of self destruction. Now, being the "great" guy he is, he decides to find a cure. His non stop going puts strain on her and him for that matter. This movie is nothing like I expected, but was way deeper and very real. As I said earlier it was made by adults for adults. No children should watch this film, unless you feel like explaining a great many things turning a 2 hour movie into a 4 hour movie. It did a great job of appealing to men and women. On the other hand it was marketed poorly. Even when it was done, My wife and I discussed that the previews suggested nothing of what we just saw. It is a hard movie to categorize. It's romantic comedy, drama, human interest, and regular comedy.

NBM rates Love & Other Drugs - Phenomenal

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