Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway star in Edward Zwick’s fact-based drama that’s part comedic exposé, part doomed romance.
Gyllenhaal plays ambitious Jamie Randall who starts his working life flogging audiovisual items. He’s successful, but when he learns there’s serious money to be made as a pharmaceutical salesman he jumps ship faster than you can swallow an aspirin. And, once he’s learnt his new industry’s sales techniques (some seemingly more grounded in legality than others), he begins to make good money from flogging anti-depressants for a US drug giant.
Then, when his company starts to market Viagra for sexual dysfunction, his career and income skyrocket. And it’s round about here that he bumps into Maggie Murdock (Hathaway). Their attraction is mutual but there’s a problem: she has early-onset Parkinson’s disease. At first Randall is content with her insistence that the basis of their relationship is no-strings sex, but then he realises he’s falling in love with her…
Love & Other Drugs is loosely based on Jamie Reidy’s Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, a book that was a little too revealing of the pharmaceutical industry’s machinations: he was sacked as soon as his account was published.
Love & Other Drugs: Monday 01.00am on FilmFour.
