Love and Other Drugs
Crit
"Who Wants to See Anne Hathaway’s Breasts?" asks the headline of the Newsweek review. "Must be a trick question," thinks I. No, just a snarky way into another unenthusiastic assessment for a film currently showing a 44% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com, 33% from the sites designated Top Critics. So, the upcoming Oscar cohost's extrathespian attributes notwithstanding, I was set to give this a pass--until the New Yorker's David Denby, whose reviews aren't nearly as much fun as Anthony Lane's but tend to hew more closely to my tastes, gave the film as enthusiastic a notice as I've seen for it, concluding with a downright astonishing declaration:Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.Whoa! I mean, whoa! That's a hell of a core then, no? So after that I pretty much had to see AH's breasts and whatever else the film had to show me, right? Well, here's the thing: no, it's not really much of a movie. In fact, if you're not predisposed to love Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, then her character is just another clichéd movie sick girl too selfless to fall in love, and when forced to move to plan B, too selfless to let the one she loves sacrifice himself for her; and he's just another clichéd movie cocksman too selfish to fall in love but who finds himself completed by the first truly remarkable woman he's ever met and gets to win her over with a late speech where he has her at "hello."
But they really are pretty terrific; only one of them is a salesman in the movie, but they both sell a shitload of cinematic snakeoil. The you-should-pardon-the-expression rise of Viagra is really a blue herring, which enables a little preaching about how fucked up the drug companies and the insurance companies are, forcing senior citizens to make bus trips to Canada for affordable generics. It's really just boy-and-girl-meet-cute; well, actually they meet creepy, but they're cute enough to compensate. And any film with both the Kinks and Regina Spektor on the soundtrack earns extra points.
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