'Love and other Drugs' Review: Chemistry Between Leads Overcomes Flaws

True love is a hard thing to define, for there are as many ways to describe it as there are longstanding couples on this planet. For some, it’s about the romance, for others about being an emotional rock of support throughout life’s ups and downs. For still others, great sex is a key spice to a flavorful lifetime of happiness.

In the new romantic dramedy “Love and Other Drugs,” Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway play a pair who hook up – literally and figuratively – in 1996, just as Viagra entered the American marketplace and created a seismic shift in the romantic lives of countless couples. Jake plays Jamie, a freewheeling ladies’ man who enters the world of pharamceutical sales just in time to make a lucrative living hawking both Zoloft and the sexual wonder drug.

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Hathaway’s Maggie, however, veers between being way more reserved than Jamie , and engaging him in bouts of sexual abandon. She’s an artist who lives in a fancy loft (despite having no visible source of real income, a rare flaw in this film), and runs hot for Jamie as long as there are no romantic entanglements beyond the base level of wanton sex. Anything deeper suddenly drives her away, a fact that eventually drives Jamie crazy as he wonders what she’s hiding.

Yet the fact is, he already knows her worst secret: Maggie has Stage One Parkinson’s Disease. As Jamie starts to see the appeal of hot monogamy over emotionally cold promiscuity, he finds he’s falling hard for Maggie – and that fact will lead to plenty of complications.

“Love and Other Drugs” does have some cliched aspects to its plot (after all, do romantic comedies ever seem to end sadly?), and a couple of holes (how does an artist like her afford a place like that without any major sales depicted?, and why does the movie shift its attention completely away from the rollercoaster ride of selling red-hot drugs in the second half?). But what it does have going for it makes up for the problems in spades.

First off, Gyllenhaal and Hathaway have a chemistry that is both hotter, funnier and even more touching than almost any screen couple in at least a decade. They seem to spend half the movie either fully naked (sans crotch shots) or in various states of undress in bed, but their chemistry and the sheer joy they bring to their performances is thrilling to watch. Gyllenhaal reinvents himself before the audience’s eyes, making a welcome and daring departure from his usual morose demeanor in heavy-handed message dramas like “Rendition,” “Brothers” and “Brokeback Mountain.”

Hathaway is pure magic as well, radiating heat in the first half while delivering the film’s zesty dialogue with aplomb. But as the film starts to shift to more serious matters of the heart and spirit, she takes viewers along for an often-heartbreaking ride. It’s a credit to writers Ed Zwick (who also directed) , Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Rudolph, who all previously worked their magic on television in winning relationship dramas like “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething”, that they are able to make the shift to deeper territory without taking the charm out of the film.

For those who are easily offended by nudity and sex scenes, be forewarned that this movie goes way beyond most studio romcoms. Face it: It’s either going to get you lucky or offended. But for those wondering if the movie has any typical Gyllenhaal sucker-punches, the only time the film wanders any where near being about an issue is in having fun showing Jamie’s wheeler-dealer side in his attempts to do anything to have doctors and others try Viagra, and when he is shown being taught not to have moral qualms about the doping of America during his training at Pfizer. That aspect is also played for laughs, however.

But yet it works in depicting the milieu and lifestyles of people who think they have all the time in the world to have great sex and put off the harder parts of love and living, and then have to face the inevitable knowledge that great sex is not enough. And as they learn the meaning of true and lasting love, “Love and Other Drugs” winds up as wise as it is witty and hot.