Wednesday, November 24, 2010

When you think of Ed Zwick you think of the glossy historical dramas that focus on honorable characters at war with an overwhelming force. You think of Morgan Freeman, American flag clutched in hand, rolling down a hill of wounded Northeners in Glory or Tom Cruise facing down an army of soldiers clad in the traditional armor of the samurai in The Last Samurai. You think this because Edward Zwick has made a career of highlighting the forgotten heroes of history and he does quite a good job of doing so. Thus it is no surprise that Love and Other Drugs, Zwick’s attempt to make a modern, romantic comedy feels wrenched from the past, a treacle bit of swoony comedy that painfully adheres to the standard genre stereotypes.

Review - Love And Other Drugs

Love and Other Drugs is the story of rich-boy-with-no-ambition-but-lots-of-smarts Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhal) and his foray in to pharmaceutical sales and his eventual meeting with Parkinsons-afflicted stunner Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway) and the way in which their love blossoms from a relationship based entirely on sex. Somewhere Viagra is introduced and Ed Zwick is given the opportunity to do a wee bit of soap-boxing about the terrible state of medicine in America. It’s a standard storyline: obnoxious man meets attractive, hip artist woman, for unlikely reasons they end up naked on her floor; they agree to sex (and this film is, quite surprisingly so, rife with nudity) and nothing else but of course this doesn’t work out and they fall in love but things happen and they fall out of love and then, well, you’ll just have watch the film for yourself. Look at those descriptions of the film though, this could be any bland romantic comedy that slunk in and out of theaters in the mid-to-late 90s.

And it feels like the 1990s. It feels like Edward Zwick awoke from a slumber one day and thought, I want to make a film that isn’t about a historical war, rallied the troops and when he sat down to film it, didn’t have a clue as to what the world of today looked or felt like. This film begins with Jake Gyllenhal hock-handedly dancing to Third Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Life and just spirals down rabbit hole from there. The outfits, the camera work, the dull usage of black and white film - it’s as if Zwick wanted to make a movie that paid homage to his favorite unfilmed decade, which ably does, but at the expense of making any sort of watchable film.

This film would be an utter waste if not for the movie-carrying performance by Anne Hathaway. Saddled with script that does nothing original, Hathaway still manages to me Maggie Murdock (a bundle of Parkinson stereotypes) a vivacious, interesting, thoroughly attractive character whom you believe would draw the attention of men, regardless of their professions. Scenes with Hathaway shine, even though in the majority she’s paired with the vanilla lack of charm that Jake Gyllenhal is quickly becoming.

I can only hope that this is an Ed Zwick experiment, a dalliance from his usual period pieces that can be swept under the rug in favor of the palatable dramas we’ve come to expect from him.

 

Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and the KEXP blog.  He also has his own Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.   If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his writings here at Side One: Track One then please do so here.

- Noah Sanders -



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