Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Randall (the womanizing Viagra hard-seller in Love & other drugs)
"Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a slacker electronics salesman who somehow manages to hook a gig selling pharmaceuticals for Pfizer. Despite his womanizing charm, he is unable to break through on the Prozac vs. Zoloft war. In the midst of his very humorous pill-pushing rep moments, however, he finds some humanity after meeting Maggie Murdock (Hathaway), a Parkinson’s patient he encounters while bribing a doctor to act as an intern and help move his product.
Don’t ask how this concept works, but suffice to say you believe in the payoffs and exchanges between the reps and the doctors. You may find yourself wondering if the film couldn’t have been split in two, so we could cover the romance as well as the finesse the nuances of the pharmaceutical industry, but never mind.
At any rate, Randall’s slick womanizing attitude is very much neutralized by Hathaway’s oddly aloof and extremely detached persona. Knowing her illness, she wants to make permanent connections, a perfect companion for Jamie. Will the casual sex between these two oddly-matched characters, morph into something more? Will Jamie realize he has a soul, after all? Will Maggie show definitive signs of degeneration with her illness, attempting to plug away at your heart strings?
While the script has plenty witty dialogue to fuel the film, it is really the performances that bring “Love and Other Drugs” to a rise. We get some good laughs from always solid side-liner Oliver Platt as Jamie’s partner; from Hank Azaria as a Viagra-addicted doctor that helps lift Jamie’s career; and perhaps most of all from Josh Gad as Jamie’s brother Josh, a multi-millionaire younger brother with marriage problems, and just problems in general.
But this is after all, a romance, and the leads are the life or death of the picture. Fortunately, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway have more than enough. After working together on 2005’s Best Picture nominee “Brokeback Mountain”, the two are at obvious ease with one another. If chemistry is crucial for a romantic comedy these two had it in spades walking onto the set. Gyllenhaal works his part perfectly as a somewhat sleazy salesman that slowly begins to look beyond himself.
Hathaway, however, is the real star here and perhaps gives her best performance to date playing a character with a debilitating disease. Zwick’s script allows Hathaway to show the extreme fear of having Parkinson’s, without going too far in the sappy end of the drama tree.
With “Love and Other Drugs”, Zwick is very much like Jamie’s pharmaceutical rep: He’s selling us on something we may not need, but is slick enough in his sales approach to have us buying into his shifting and mood-altering script".
Source: www.thereporteronline.net
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Randall (the womanizing Viagra hard-seller in Love & other drugs)
"Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a slacker electronics salesman who somehow manages to hook a gig selling pharmaceuticals for Pfizer. Despite his womanizing charm, he is unable to break through on the Prozac vs. Zoloft war. In the midst of his very humorous pill-pushing rep moments, however, he finds some humanity after meeting Maggie Murdock (Hathaway), a Parkinson’s patient he encounters while bribing a doctor to act as an intern and help move his product.
Don’t ask how this concept works, but suffice to say you believe in the payoffs and exchanges between the reps and the doctors. You may find yourself wondering if the film couldn’t have been split in two, so we could cover the romance as well as the finesse the nuances of the pharmaceutical industry, but never mind.
At any rate, Randall’s slick womanizing attitude is very much neutralized by Hathaway’s oddly aloof and extremely detached persona. Knowing her illness, she wants to make permanent connections, a perfect companion for Jamie. Will the casual sex between these two oddly-matched characters, morph into something more? Will Jamie realize he has a soul, after all? Will Maggie show definitive signs of degeneration with her illness, attempting to plug away at your heart strings? 
While the script has plenty witty dialogue to fuel the film, it is really the performances that bring “Love and Other Drugs” to a rise. We get some good laughs from always solid side-liner Oliver Platt as Jamie’s partner; from Hank Azaria as a Viagra-addicted doctor that helps lift Jamie’s career; and perhaps most of all from Josh Gad as Jamie’s brother Josh, a multi-millionaire younger brother with marriage problems, and just problems in general.
But this is after all, a romance, and the leads are the life or death of the picture. Fortunately, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway have more than enough. After working together on 2005’s Best Picture nominee “Brokeback Mountain”, the two are at obvious ease with one another. If chemistry is crucial for a romantic comedy these two had it in spades walking onto the set. Gyllenhaal works his part perfectly as a somewhat sleazy salesman that slowly begins to look beyond himself. 
Hathaway, however, is the real star here and perhaps gives her best performance to date playing a character with a debilitating disease. Zwick’s script allows Hathaway to show the extreme fear of having Parkinson’s, without going too far in the sappy end of the drama tree.
With “Love and Other Drugs”, Zwick is very much like Jamie’s pharmaceutical rep: He’s selling us on something we may not need, but is slick enough in his sales approach to have us buying into his shifting and mood-altering script". Source: www.thereporteronline.net
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