Film review: Love and Other Drugs

THIS specious comedy-drama about a vacuous Viagra salesman who falls in love with a stage one Parkinson's sufferer just sneaks in as one of the year's more wretched releases. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as the former, Anne Hathaway as the latter and neither comes away with their dignity intact – and that's not just because the film has them engaged in the kind of faux edgy and explicit raunchiness that whips gossip rags and movie commentators into paroxysms of panting hysteria until people actually see the film and realise all the nudity on display is about as sexy as a breast examination.

Which is actually how the protagonists meet – with Gyllenhaal's drug rep Jamie hustling his way into a doctor's office in which feisty Parkinson's sufferer Maggie (Hathaway) is having an unusual mark on her cleavage examined. Though furious at first, Maggie sees in Jamie the kind of callow, self-centred one-night stand-seeking manwhore who isn't looking for – indeed, isn't even capable of – a long-term relationship.

In other words, the perfect guy for someone like her, who long ago figured out that no man is going to commit for the long haul once he realises what her condition will eventually mean for them both.

Promptly instigating a mutually beneficial sex-only relationship with a clearly delighted Jamie, Maggie's plan is sabotaged almost immediately by Jamie falling in love with her. That he's not quite the soulless human being suggested by his ruthless profession or his surface insincerity is really just a way of implying that the pharmaceutical industry the film pretends to be having a dig at is really not as bad as we might imagine (the amount of product placement for genuine drugs certainly indicates the film isn't out to ruffle any feathers).

That the film is willing to exploit the tragic relationship at its core to accomplish this is, unfortunately, a measure of how low it's willing to stoop, though its problems extend far beyond this. The anachronistic period details of its late 1990s setting; the tonal irregularities that see it pinball wildly from rom-com, to Judd Apatow-style raunch fest, to toothless satire, to Love Story-esque tear-jerker; the lack of chemistry between the leads … none of it rings true.

It's as if veteran director Edward Zwick signed on to tell one story and got railroaded into telling four different ones instead. The resulting film is a saccharine-fuelled, clich-ridden mess.

Loose Cannons (15) HHHHH

Directed by: Ferzan Ozpetek

Starring: Riccardo Scamarcio, Alessandro Preziosi, Nicole Graumado

SEXUAL identity and generational conflict provide much of the meat for this Italian comedy-drama, the latest from the Turkish-born director Ferzan Ospetek, who has become a semi-visible fixture on both the queer cinema and arthouse scenes thanks to films such as Ignorant Fairies and Facing Window. Loose Cannons is perhaps his most accessible film to date, but it's also one of his most disappointing, a work that appears to have sacrificed some of the careful artistry of his earlier films for the sake of being more commercially palatable.

It's the story of two brothers, the youngest of whom, Tomasso (Riccardo Scamarcio), has decided that the only way he can break free from the family's pasta manufacturing empire in order to pursue his dream of becoming a writer is to come out of the closet and announce to his sure-to-be-devastated father that he's gay. Before he has a chance to do so, though, his elder brother Antonio (Alessandro Preziosi) beats him to the punch at a family get-together, promptly sending pop to the hospital with a mild cardiac arrest. As a result, Tomasso reluctantly answers the call of familial duty by agreeing to become his father's sole successor. Yet while he finds a diversion amidst his new compromised lifestyle courtesy of his odd infatuation with a newly arrived rich girl called Alba (Nicole Graumado), as time wears on he finds it increasingly difficult to suppress both his sexual and creative yearnings. Ospeteck has some valid things to say here about the hypocrisy of an older generation that regards homosexuality as anti-family while turning a blind eye to heterosexual infidelity.

Oddly, though, he chooses to confront his characters' homophobia by filling his film with the kind of swishy, non-threatening gay stereotypes that mainstream audiences have deemed acceptable.

Film review: Love and Other Drugs | Loose Cannons