Hollywood PD

MARIE: I’ve been writing a few articles and book reviews for the Danish Parkinson’s Association’s magazine, and now Jon and I have just produced our first joint article. The editor asked us to go see the film Love and Other Drugs, and here is what we thought of it:

Parkinson’s: the Hollywood edition

The Hollywood film Love and Other Drugs has already been reviewed in the daily papers, so most readers probably know that it’s about Jamie, an unscrupulous motor mouth of a pharmaceutical sales rep (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who falls in love with Maggie, a laidback artist with early onset Parkinson’s and a tendency to prefer sex to tenderness (played by Anne Hathaway). The genre is rom-com. The comedy element is delivered by Jamie and his younger brother, a nerdy IT millionaire with a penchant for internet porn, while the romance appears as the relationship between Jamie and Maggie develops from an orgy of naked body parts into something more profound – and this is where PD comes in as the difficulty the lovers must surmount.

The film has had mixed reviews and has been criticized for being too kind to big pharma, to the point of being one long commercial for Jamie’s hottest product, Viagra. We don’t agree. While it is true that the film provides no exposé of the industry, it doesn’t pull its punches in the portrayal of superficial, fast talking and deeply unethical sales reps’ attempts to influence egocentric, drug addicted and disillusioned doctors.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway both do a great job, and they are certainly easy on the eye in the many nude scenes, although that is perhaps less engrossing for a European audience than for the more prudish American home market. And yet the film feels flat. We laughed, but weren’t in tears of laughter. We were moved, but weren’t moved to the other kind of tears either. So we probably agree with the other point of criticism, that Love and Other Drugs is really two films squashed together into one manuscript: a satire on the pharmaceutical industry, and a romantic story about the difficulty of abandoning yourself to love when one partner has a chronic disease.

It is a rare treat to see Parkinson’s portrayed on screen, especially with a young PWP in the lead. It’s good that for once the disease is not delegated to a few tremulous extras at the back of a nursing home scene. It is perhaps less good that Maggie’s only symptoms are a mild hand tremor and some clumsiness, that her medication seems rather peculiar, and that she apparently has no need of a regular neurologist.

But Awakenings from 1990 (with Robert de Niro in one of his best performances), the only other film we know of about Parkinson’s disease, is no truthful document either. There is quite a gulf between the film and the reality presented in the book on which it is based, Dr Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings from 1973.

Does it matter? A cinema film only lasts a couple of hours, and Love and Other Drugs also needs to make time to be fun and a bit naughty. It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is: not great art, but good entertainment with perhaps a little bit of an edge. You don’t learn much about the symptoms of PD, but there are pretty effective (short) passages about how the disease affects every day life, relationships, hopes for the future and (self) confidence. Likewise, we liked the descriptions of Jamie’s wild hunt for a cure – on Maggie’s behalf, but without her consent – and of Maggie’s first meeting with other Parkinsonians.

At least the audience will know more about Parkinson’s Disease after watching Love and Other Drugs than one would know, say, about prostitution after watching Pretty Woman, or about paleontology after watching Jurassic Park. This is entertainment, but not just entertainment. And that’s actually good enough.