Love and Other Drugs – review

The review below of Love and Other Drugs – described as a film where “a womanising drug rep. falls, redemptively, for a woman with Parkinson’s” – expressed the opinion that the pharmaceuticals company Pfizer “would never have allowed this movie to use its brand name so freely were it not absolutely assured that some very effective product placement was going on”. A Pfizer representative asks us to make clear that there was no such arrangement: “The company was not involved in the film’s production in any way and we were not approached by the film’s producers with regard to the use of our trademarks. Furthermore, in many countries, including the UK, such product placement of prescription-only medicines is not only a contravention of industry codes of practice, but also of the law, including the Medicines (Advertising) Regulations 1994. A subheading on the article also referred to one of the characters as “a Parkinson’s victim”, terminology at odds with the Guardian’s style book.

There’s a cynical chill at the heart of this insidious corporate moviemercial for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company, masquerading as a heart-wrenching romantic drama about a womanising drug rep, who falls, redemptively, for a woman with Parkinson’s. Some pundits have gasped at what they imagine to be the film’s tough, hard-hitting satire at the expense of big pharma. The truth is that Pfizer would never have allowed this movie to use its brand name so freely were it not absolutely assured that some very effective product placement was going on. The cynicism is there to be surmounted – jabs at the drug companies lend authenticity and plausibility to the insistent underlying message, that the drugs work and that the people selling them are, basically, really good guys.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a pushy salesman for Pfizer in the 1990s, who is struggling to get doctors to prescribe Zoloft, his company’s anti-depression medicine. Without a qualm, he bamboozles his way into hospital wards and seduces receptionists. When Pfizer launch the wildly popular Viagra, he becomes a big hitter. But at the same time he falls for Maggie, played by Anne Hathaway, a smart, vulnerable young woman with stage one Parkinson’s, a condition for which – oh, irony! oh, humility! – there are no drug remedies.

It is not simply that this film looks as if it was written and directed by a Hollywood robot programmed with cliche software, nor simply that Gyllenhaal and Hathaway look like movie-moppets, hyperreal, almost digital creations. (Contrast their far superior performances as a screen couple in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.) It isn’t just the laughable unrealities: Maggie is supposed to earn a living at some Starbucks-style coffee house; the rest of the time she works on artistic creations, involving Polaroids, in a palatial boho loft apartment. It isn’t even the sub-Love-Story gender stereotypes: a woman falling for a man with Parkinson’s would of course be unthinkable.

What’s objectionable about this film is the feeling that you’ve been made the target of some misdirection scam: a cinematic three-card trick. In theory, the movie is all about Jamie’s love for Maggie, with her (tastefully rendered) early-stage Parkinson’s. But the real truth of this film is happening elsewhere: in its general PR for Pfizer and the celebration of its masterpiece, Viagra. The film was based on an insider memoir by a former Viagra salesman. His story is sentimentally reinvented for the screen. In falling for a woman with Parkinson’s, our hero becomes emotionally and morally potent. In terms of decency, maturity and taking responsibility, he learns to get it up. Avoid this sickly-sweet, dishonest nonsense.