In a way I think 2010
marked a severe downturn in the number of films that were hyped for award
contention where sex scenes and nudity were critical to the movie. The most
famous example of it was Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a film that was billed in a way for the
notorious lesbian hook-up between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis that is the
culmination of a rivalry-flirtation that has been going on to that point. Like
much of the film, the hallucinatory quality is such that the viewer ends up
questioning its reality. Blue Valentine was actually released in an
R-rated and an unrated version because of a very frank sex scene that takes
place between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams’ characters in a motel room
halfway through the picture. This was
done no doubt more because of the nudity then anything else; the scene in
question is one of such desperation that there’s very little erotic about it.
On the comic side of this was The Kids are All Right, which had some
truly hysterical sex scenes between Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo that
honestly seemed to come as much as a shock to their characters as the audience
when they happened.
All three of these
movies received multiple Oscar nominations and Black Swan and The
Kids Are All Right were nominated for Best Picture. The common link between
the three movies is that were all basically independently made moves, which by
this point had become one of the major sources for films with frank sexual
scenes at their center. (Quite a few of the movies on this list are going to be
from that circuit.) Love and Other Drugs which was the other major film
in 2010 that had scenes of that heightened sexuality was an outlier in 2010 in
that the sexuality and nudity were not only part of the film but indeed part of
the hype. Much of the advertising featured leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway
basically naked: a similar pose would be seen on the posters for the film and
in the movie trailers. There was early talk of both actors getting Oscar nominations
for their work; indeed both received Golden Globe nominations for their performances
that year. (Hathaway lost to Annette Bening for The Kids are All Right while
Gyllenhaal lost to Paul Giamatti for Barney’s Version an interesting
comedy that never even entered Academy Award voters’ minds.) But since the
Oscars has never been willing to take comedy seriously, neither was nominated
and Hathaway is remembered that year, unfortunately, for the disastrous Oscars
ceremony that February. (I’m pretty sure this is where the hatred of Hathaway as
a person began.)
Now to be clear when
I rented the film well after this, I was
watching for the nudity but I had no idea was a superbly funny and dare I say,
heartfelt romantic comedy I was going to
get. If I had known at the time the
filmmakers were the team of Marshall Herskowitz and Edward Zwick, not only
would I have been less surprised but I would have hurt the movie didn’t get
recognition.
Edward Zwick clearly
has a place among the most undervalued directors in history. He has directly
some of the most critically acclaimed films of all time, including Glory,
Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, The Last Samurai and Blood
Diamond. Some of these films have received Oscar nominations and even
Oscars, but Zwick has never been nominated for any of them. He and his
collaborator Marshall Herskowitz have a far better reputation when it comes to
television as over a period of fifteen years they created some of the most
unforgettable series in history. There most famous creations were the
groundbreaking Thirtysomething and the iconic cult hit My So-Called
Life. I actually wrote very favorably about their last (to date) network
series Once and Again, one of the most undervalued TV series at the
start of the Golden Age. If there is a theme in the work of Zwick and
Herskowitz, it is their tendency to look very frankly inside the bedrooms of
their characters and make the audience look too. Thirtysomething featured
the first scene on television with two gay men in bed; My So-Called Life dealt
with all version of sexuality, both for teenagers and their parents and Once
and Again continued that format. Relativity
another short lived series took this to a far greater extent, actually
trying to air a scene in which a character proposed to another at the moment of
orgasm. (ABC cut it.)
Perhaps none of this
should come as a surprise considering that Zwick’s first feature film was the
original About Last Night… a film known as one of the best movies made
by the so-called Brat Pack, featuring some erotic scenes that truly must have
contorted the censors of the MPAA at the time. (I may cover it myself at some
point.) However when Zwick made Love and Other Drugs, it might very well
have come as a shock that this was the next project from the man whose previous
film was the World War II drama Defiance.
Love and Other Drugs
makes
it very clear the kind of character Jamie is in its opening montage where he is
an electronics store selling every kind of video equipment almost exclusive to
female patrons. Naturally, he is caught having sex with his boss’ girlfriend
and as he runs out the door, one of his customers gives him his phone number on
the way out. Jamie’s brother Josh, who’s cashed in on the tech bubble
essentially tells him that if sex was a marketable skill, “you’d be richer than
me.”
The movie is set in
1990s Pittsburg. Jamie is the technically the bad apple of his family. His
father is a successful doctor, so is his Jamie’s sister and Josh had just
become a millionaire. Jamie has always had the potential to be a doctor but as
we learn later on, he couldn’t get through college because of a severe case of
ADD. (“Ritalin at eight,” he mentions at one point.) More out of a sense of
wandering than anything else, he ends up become a pharmaceutical rep, under the
tutelage of Bruce Winston (the always delightful Oliver Platt) who thinks that
Jamie “and his swinging dick” get him to Chicago, the promised land where Bruce
family lives.
Jamie is more than
willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, and that includes sleeping with
the nurses with the doctors where he has to make his biggest sales. (I think
this film may be the first time I truly realized who Judy Greer was and what
she could do even small roles.) This also includes cheerfully taking all the
Prozac out of the sales department, replacing them with Zoloft, and dumping
them into the garbage. (In one of the subtler gags in the film, there is a
homeless man who notices them the first time and apparently helps himself to
them. By the time of our last encounter with him, he asks for them and tells
Jamie that he is a job interview coming up the next day to prepare for.)
In the midst of trying
to convince that doctor (played by Hank Azaria) to commit, Jamie impersonates a
doctor. It is there he meets Maggie Murdock (Hathaway) a 26 year old who is
suffering from Parkinson’s. In the midst of this conversation, Maggie takes off
her shirt. This might be considered a meet-cute except when Jamie is unloading
his samples into his trunk and Maggie clocks him with her purse. It is a
measure of the kind of man Jamie is that he can’t remember the name of the
woman he just ogled and when asks her for, she snickers: “Strong eye contact.
Implied intimacy. You’ll make your quota” before disappearing.
A committed Jamie
has absolutely no problem flirting with the nurse he’s been sleeping with to
get Maggie’s number and calling her. Maggie, who clearly has little time for
his bullshit, endures a minute of his sweet talk before saying: “This is a
sales call. You want to close right?” Similarly when they meet at the coffee
shop she works at, she cuts through all of the preamble he usually goes through
by just saying “Let’s go…This isn’t about making a connection for you. This isn’t
even about sex for you. This is about the sheer boredom of being you.” Jamie is
only momentarily flummoxed before he says: “Does that mean I don’t have to
leave a tip?”
The sex scenes that
follow are not merely erotic, they are also very funny, mainly because Maggie
spends much of the movie as the aggressor in them, something that clearly
flummoxed Jamie. (In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, she shows up
at his apartment, takes off her coat to reveal she is naked…utterly shocking
Jamie’s younger brother, who is sharing the apartment with him.) It’s pretty clear
that Jamie has spent his life being chased by women; he is unprepared to deal
with the fact that the shoe is on the other foot. His younger brother keeps
needling him for this fact throughout the movie with wonderful insults at his
behavior: “Were you molested by a Care Bear?” he says when Jamie tries to say
something sentimental. (I know this was the first time I saw Josh Gad do
anything and he steals every scene he’s in.)
Of course much of
Maggie’s resistance is because of her condition. She has a disease that
will probably kill her well before she turns 35 and she seems willing to accept
this. Her independence is someone who has just decided to live her own life no
matter what. When Jamie finally persuades her that he wants to have a serious
relationship, her reaction is simple: “When you end it, I get to hate you” as
well as giving very specific conditions as to their relationship. As they walk
off she finishes their conversation by saying: “Why am I mad at you already?”
And of course they do come to odds over her condition. After a medical
convention in which Maggie meets a lot of Parkinson’s sufferers who have
accepted their condition, there is a montage where Jamie goes along with this
and then the inevitable point where he starts dragging Maggie to every doctor
possible. Maggie has accepted her fate but Jamie hasn’t. Their eventual
break-up (this is a romantic comedy) happens because of this divide.
In a way, Love
and Other Drugs is about a deeper subject than its love story: the movie is
a pretty clear indictment of our healthcare system, which was much under debate
during the films making. Jamie achieves his greatest success as a rep when he
hears from Maggie about how Pfizer is making a new drug called Viagra. This
comes at a time when they are having a conversation about performance anxiety
(which leads to so many entendres it becomes first hysterical, then sexual) but
made clear by Maggie is just how much more important a drug that fixes impotence
is to the public than one that cures depression. When asks about her insurance
for her drugs, Maggie produces a roll of bills to pay for her medication
instead and we later see her leading a group of elderly citizens on a bus to Canada
where they get cheaper drugs and reminds him to have cash when they do so. (The
climax of the film takes place when Jamie manages to catch up with her on one
such trip.) And the scenes with the homeless man taking the anti-depressants isn’t
a coincidence; the movie makes it very clear he’d never be able get the
medication he needs any other way.
Gyllenhaal and
Hathaway have a great chemistry, which honestly shouldn’t surprise anyone. In Brokeback
Mountain Hathaway played the woman who would become Gyllenhaal’s wife and
their characters have a sex scene in the back seat of Hathaway’s car within a
few hours of their first date. (One critic called Hathaway’s tearing off her
bra ‘the most overt sexual act in the entire film.) The two of them are clearly
comfortable around each other throughout the movie and the chemistry crackles
between them in every scene there in together. What I find interesting about
their work in this movie is that, in an odd way, this was sort of an aberration
film for both of them.
Both Gyllenhaal and
Hathaway were child actors. Gyllenhaal’s breakthrough role was the polarizing
independent film Donnie Darko and he spent much of his early career working
more in those films, frequently playing younger lovers of older women (Lovely
and Amazing, The Good Girl, Proof) Many of the characters he has played in
more mainstream films have rarely been the romantic lead (Zodiac, End of Watch,
Prisoners and by far his greatest performance in Nightcrawler)
Gyllenhaal has been in more than his share of mainstream films, most recently
as Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home) but he has never played as easily
a likable a character as Jamie in any film since Love and Other Drugs.
Hathaway, by contrast,
worked in more conventional films: her break through role was in The
Princess Diaries and she was most famous,
prior to her Academy Award for Les Miserables for her role in The
Devil Wears Prada. Many of her movies essentially were potential franchises
(Get Smart, an underrated action film parody) and mediocre romantic
comedies (Becoming Jane, Bride Wars and Valentine’s Day).
But Hathaway has always had a certain love for independent films: along with
her work in Brokeback Mountain, she had earned a Best Actress nomination
for her work in the superb independent film Rachel Get Married.) There
has since been an interesting mix between big budget movies and independent
films ever since: Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises and reuniting
with Nolan in Interstellar and a superb performance in the criminally
undervalued comedy Colossal. Her work in the last few years has become
more and more intriguing, particularly as she has ventured into the Peak TV
world in Modern Love and WeCrashed. Like many actresses as they get older, I suspect
she will venture more into television in the years to come, much in the same
way that Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have.
It probably won’t
shock you that Love and Other Drugs has a happy ending; this is, after
all, still a romantic comedy. But where this film moves above the traditional
rom-coms is that the ending reunion is braced with reality. Jamie tells Maggie
that she needs somebody. Maggie denies it twice, but the second time Jamie
responds: “Everybody does.” Maggie starts crying and says simply: “I’m going to
need you more.” What Jamie ends up saying is beyond the traditional declaration
of love we get in even less-conventional romantic comedies. Before one of their
iconic dance numbers, Fred once told Ginger: “There may be sad times ahead…”
before saying: “Let’s face the music and dance.” There may be no dancing
involved but Jamie essentially tells Maggie that should enjoy the latter before
the former. Isn’t that what all love stories are?
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