Love & Other Drugs

Directed by Edward Zwick

(R)

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Love & Other Drugs is a “sometimes intoxicating, sometimes headache-inducing cocktail,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Set in 1996, the film begins as a romantic comedy—with a twist that unravels all too soon. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a fast-talking, bed-hopping pharmaceutical sales representative who falls for a wry, beautiful patient played by Anne Hathaway. Their relationship gets going hot and heavy before we learn that Maggie suffers from Parkinson’s, an affliction that gives the movie “a gravity it does not quite know how to handle.” The story devolves into a mood-swinging “mess,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Director and co-writer Edward Zwick can’t decide whether to make a candid sex pic, an old-fashioned romance, or a medical melodrama. Although watching Gyllenhaal and Hathaway get it on isn’t the worst way to spend two hours, the fun wears off, said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. You never forget you’re watching “two highly paid professionals create a cinematic placebo—strong enough to entertain” but lacking long-term impact.