Love and Other Drugs - film - drug rep Zoloft

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Love and Other Drugs () is a pleasant surprise. Its director, Zwick, specialises not in romantic comedies but in high-end action films along the lines of The Way Back – his last film, Defiance, was a tale of escape and survival in the second world war. But he made his debut with About Last Night . . . , an adaptation of Mamet's play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, so he has form hereabouts. Zwick presides over two stars (Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway) who sit a little higher up the food chain than the usual B-list couplings. The script (which Zwick co-wrote) is based on Reidy's memoir Hard Sell, about his time as a drug rep for Pfizer, selling first Zoloft and then Viagra.

So what we have here is a tale of a playboy who finds love – but one in which that familiar trajectory is given less emphasis than, say, the challenges faced by Zoloft reps keen to displace Xanax as the best-selling anti-depressant. A period setting (1996), a comparatively out-of-the-way city backdrop (Pittsburgh), and a plausible amount of sex and nudity give further distinctiveness to this smoothly handled, thickly textured film. The final scene is a flop, complete with reflective "what I learned" voiceover, but then we have Regina Spektor singing away over the credits, and goodwill is restored.