Love & Other Drugs

Edward Zwick’s film starts from Jamie Reidy’s memoir Hard Sell, but only half comes from there. Reidy wrote about the pharmaceutical sales machine of the 1990s; Maggie and the Parkinson’s storyline were invented by screenwriter Charles Randolph, who said he did not use much of the book. The halves run on two logics, and you feel the seam while watching. Maggie had been written as someone avoiding sex out of fear; Anne Hathaway argued she would instead use her sexuality to compensate, and thirty to forty pages were rewritten. For the gathering of patients Zwick cast no actors, working with people who actually have Parkinson’s and asking them to describe their own lives. Michael J. Fox had warned him he would not manage to make it funny enough. That scene draws the film’s sharpest objection. The critic Shlomo Schwartzberg wrote that it keeps evading the illness afflicting Maggie in favour of ordinary romantic fodder. Set in Pittsburgh in 1996, it pairs Gyllenhaal with Hathaway a second time, after Brokeback Mountain. A good fit if you take the turn from drug rep comedy into chronic illness drama as the point rather than a wobble. Not for anyone unsettled by the film sliding back into romantic shape right after those patients have spoken.