By Scott Marks | SDUN Film Critic
Why ruin what has the potential of a powerhouse expose of the drug industry with a tragicomic disease-of-the-week subplot and a tragically unfunny Jack Black celebrity impersonator (Josh Gad) for comic relief?
We meet the beguiling and sexually irrepressible Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) just moments before he loses his sales job at an electronics store for diddling a co-worker in the stock room. He has wealthy parents to fall back on (George Segal and Jill Clayburgh in her last role), but Jamie, unlike his slovenly brother/loathsome comic relief Josh (Gad), is driven by power and success. After attending a seminar, Jamie scores a job as a drug rep for Pfizer. It’s 1996: Psychotropic drugs are in, and a little blue pill is poised to give TV talk show hosts enough punch lines to last a lifetime.
The always-welcome Oliver Platt plays Jamie’s boss Bruce, a road weary salesman eager to land the Chicago territory in order to spend more time with his family. Bruce views his booming new charge as a ticket home.
This lively, insightful repartee between teacher and student is about as good as it gets. Enter Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a free spirited photographic artist who makes her living transporting seniors across the Canadian border to help save money on their prescription meds.
How’s this for a meet cute? Jamie masquerades as an intern for what turns out to be her breast exam. She later catches up with him in the parking lot and begins beating on him with her purse. Unless she had x-ray vision or was stalking her handsome prey, how did she know from a distance that his trunk was filled with samples and that he was a rep not a doc? Maggie also comes out swinging over their first cup of coffee. Jamie whips out the old “you have beautiful eyes” come-on to which the unfazed Ms. Murdock bats her peepers and spits back, “Is that the best you have?”
Oh, yes. Did I mention that Maggie has stage one Parkinson’s disease? Neither did the theatrical trailer. If anything, the preview did its best to cut around her illness in hopes of not sending out any lethal box office vibes. (The finished product more than makes up for it with an abundance of cutaways to Maggie’s trembling hand.)
Everything in the film is either suffocatingly adorable or pitched to network TV junkies. (Zwick’s small screen ties, he acted as executive producer on “Thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life,” are apparent.) Jamie covertly replaces doctors’ samples of Prozac with Pfizer’s Zoloft and trashes the competitors’ drugs in a local dumpster much to the delight of a homeless guy. After three or four visit’s the dude shows up sporting a fresh haircut and informs Jamie that he has a job interview.
Mercifully it’s not “Love Story,” but by the same token it’s not really a love story. There’s plenty of steamy sex on display, but Parkinson’s prohibits Maggie from making a commitment and Jamie is your basic fatuous pretty boy suddenly smitten by a beautiful woman simply because she was the one to put the brakes on their relationship. This is one film I’d liked to have judged by its trailer.
