'Love and Other Drugs' is a prescription for contrivance

Give director Ed Zwick this much credit: With his new comedy-drama Love and Other Drugs, about an upstart pharmaceutical salesman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who falls for a Parkinson's-afflicted woman (Anne Hathaway), he's at least striving to give us something more than your standard-issue, disease-of-the-week weepie.

I'm just not convinced that the best way to rejuvenate an overly familiar genre is with self-consciously "edgy" sex scenes and groan-inducing erection gags. Rarely has a movie strained so hard to seem original -- and come off so awkward in the process.

Loosely inspired by the 2005 nonfiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy, Love and Other Drugs drops us into an intriguing milieu: the go-go world of prescription drug sales reps in the late 1990s, just as the blockbuster cure-all Viagra was being released into the market. Gyllenhaal's Jamie Randall has been struggling to find his groove in life when he takes a job with Pfizer and immediately discovers he has a knack for the schmoozing and glad-handling it takes to persuade doctors to begin prescribing certain drugs.

With his wide blue eyes, square-sculpted chin and swept-back hair, Gyllenhaal is the closest his generation has to an old-school matinee idol. The problem is that his performance starts from an obvious place, basically the Tom Cruise-in- Rain Man hotshot, and evolves even more predictably. On one of his doctor's office visits, he meets Hathaway's Maggie, a free spirit who asks for no pity despite her illness. The two of them embark upon what should be an ideal relationship -- hot sex, with no strings attached -- until, you guessed it, Jamie decides he wants more.

There's certainly a terrific movie waiting to be made about the modern phenomenon of "friends with benefits," people whose sexual needs are so easily satisfied that they never feel the urge to develop any deeper relationships. That's not this movie. The sexual relationship here feels like a stunt, and not an especially sexy one at that.

Zwick films Gyllenhaal and Hathaway in multiple couplings, often stark naked. But there's no heat between the performers, no sense of danger or intensity. Truly erotic onscreen couplings -- Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in Last Trango in Paris, say, or even Heath Ledger and Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain -- require actors willing to come unhinged before our eyes. These two just seem like well-lit models in a soft-core Cinemax fantasy.

Even more awkward than the romance are the attempts by Zwick and his co-screenwriters, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskovitz, to score laughs. Josh Gad (from 21) plays Jamie's obnoxious brother, recently single and camped out on Jamie's couch. At various points in the film, he pleasures himself while watching a sex tape featuring Jamie and Maggie, and confuses his brother's erection for the stick shift in his car. My best guess is that Zwick -- who with Herskovitz created thirtysomething back in the '80s, but is now pushing 60 -- thought that young viewers would find this comedy "outrageous." More likely, whether you're 18 or 81, you're just going to find the bizarrely incestuous overtones icky. (The rest of the supporting actors, including George Segal and the just-passed-away Jill Clayburgh as Jamie's parents, and Oliver Platt as his co-worker, are wasted.)

One or two provocative bits emerge from the incoherence: At one point, Jamie and Maggie attend a Parkinson's conference, where Jamie finds himself talking to a man (Peter Friedman) who advises Jamie against getting involved with someone who has the disease. What does it mean, the movie asks, to marry someone who is going to be "in sickness" a lot more than she's going to be "in health." But even this scene feels contrived: Would a perfectly normal-seeming guy, no matter how frustrated or tired, share such intimate details with a stranger? At his best, in a movie like Defiance or on the television show My So-Called Life, Zwick applies a Hollywood polish to recognizably human dilemmas. Love and Other Drugs finds him at his worst, synthetic and bombastic.