Rarely does a movie pack as much into 113 minutes as this exceptional romantic “dramedy” by Edward Zwick (thirtysomething).
Directors often stumble when trying to balance comedy and drama (consider Judd Apatow’s limp Funny People), but Zwick and co-writers Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph make it work, while also providing an acrid satire of the pharmaceutical industry.
The movie, set in the 1990s, is partly based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir of his stint as a Pfizer salesman, with a love story appended to it. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a glib womanizer and chronic failure who gets by on his seductive charm. After losing his electronics-salesman gig for screwing the boss' girlfriend, he enlists as a pharmaceutical rep, a lucrative job whose slippery ethics are a good match for his personality. The movie details the sleazy sales tactics used to push Pfizer’s pills — primarily Zoloft, which is competing fruitlessly against Eli Lilly's Prozac — such as seducing eager medical receptionists and pimping for horny physicians like Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria).
Jamie relentlessly pursues Dr. Knight's patient Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a clever, beautiful artist with pre-Raphaelite curls and early-onset Parkinson’s disease, and the pair — both averse to commitment — begin a libidinous affair, with ample onscreen nudity. Jamie’s career rockets when Pfizer launches its magical moneymaker, Viagra, but he’s blindsided by his love and concern for Maggie.
So entertaining is this sardonic romp that the sadness arising from Maggie’s illness delivers an unexpected wallop. Though the movie meanders a bit, it brims with sharp lines and good performances. The movie gets bonus points for pissing off Big Pharma: asked for its reaction to the movie, a Pfizer spokesperson sniffed in the Wall Street Journal: “The sales practices portrayed…do not conform to our policies and procedures.”
A version of this appears in Cleveland Scene.
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