Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Love & Other Drugs

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Zwick (2010)

    An overlong and eventually grotesque combination of sex comedy and incurable-illness-love-affair.  Edward Zwick’s movie is all the more grotesque because it’s often not a combination at all:  he shoves in a slab of comedy whenever the drama’s wilting, and vice versa.  Zwick’s first feature was About Last Night (1986); otherwise, he’s not a name you’d readily associate with these two kinds of material, and he’s crude in his handling of both.   His idea of directing comedy is evidently that you must be frenetic and can’t be too frenetic.  This makes the first twenty minutes or so of Love & Other Drugs nearly unbearable; without Jake Gyllenhaal’s wit and resource as Jamie Randall, an expert seducer (qua lover and drug salesman), you could strike out the ‘nearly’.  An electronics store where Jamie’s working at the start of the film, the Randall family dinner table, the Pfizer training programme Jamie gets himself onto – wherever a sequence takes place it has the same forced tempo, high volume and hectic overacting, except for Gyllenhaal, Kimberly Scott (as a stern but biddable receptionist) and Jill Clayburgh (in her brief appearance as Jamie’s mother).  It’s a real relief when a doctor, played by Hank Azaria at a believable human level, arrives on the scene.

    When Jamie meets one of the doctor’s patients, a woman in her mid-twenties called Maggie Murdock with early onset Parkinson’s, Love & Other Drugs gets interesting for a while – thanks to the chemistry of Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, and because this is the only part of the film where its two aspects are working in any kind of synergy.  (I was never clear what Maggie did for a living:  she appears to be a photographer, who works part-time as a waitress and occasionally accompanies groups of senior citizens on coach trips.)  It feels like some time since we had a screen friendship or romance with one of the pair having a fatal disease.  There’s an interest too in seeing what has and hasn’t changed in the components of this sub-genre.  It may be unusual to reveal the illness from the start and there’s certainly a lot more intercourse and nakedness than there was in Love Story but the doomed heroine’s beauty still isn’t much affected by her affliction.  Anne Hathaway’s Parkinsonian tremor comes and goes discreetly and the pale make-up accentuates her doe eyes and mile-wide smile.    Hathaway has come quite a way – further than Gyllenhaal – since they last appeared together, in Brokeback Mountain (2005).  Although Love & Other Drugs is a bad film, it reminds you of the dramatic depth and range she showed in Rachel Getting Married and makes you look forward to seeing her in better roles.   (She’s particularly convincing here in suggesting someone who talks fast and smart to keep her demons at bay.)   Although he’s a good actor, Gyllenhaal hasn’t yet created a character that develops much over the course of a film – he’s charming but unsurprising.  But he and Hathaway both have very strong audience rapport.  They’re the kind of stars who, in spite of their potent glamour, have a reality that makes the people they’re playing seem to need your emotional support.    (Both are established stars too, in spite of their youth:  he’s thirty, she’s twenty-eight.)

    Gyllenhaal and Hathaway take their clothes off a lot in Love & Other Drugs – a new departure for her in particular.  While this obviously does the film’s commercial prospects no harm, it’s also essential to the centre of the movie – the point at which the sex romp and the love story intersect – because Jamie is meant to be a heartless Lothario and Maggie is very clear that she wants sex but no kind of relationship beyond sex.  She keeps asking Jamie to reassure her that he’s a ‘shithead’ but – of course – both find themselves struggling to resist the commitment they were sure they didn’t want.    If only the film were as penetrating in other departments as it is in the sex scenes.  It’s both comically and sentimentally crass – and anaemic as any kind of satire of the competitive workings of big pharmaceutical companies.  The screenplay – by Zwick, Charles Randolph and Marshall Herskowitz – is adapted from a piece of non-fiction, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, by Jamie Reidy.  I don’t know whether the character of Jamie Randall or any elements of the love story in the film are autobiographical or whether it’s just the Pfizer background that’s taken from Reidy’s book.  According to Wikipedia, he’s now a screenwriter, author and Huffington Post blogger so it seems that he didn’t, unlike Jamie Randall, decide to prove he was a good person by going to medical school as a mature student.  (This revelation, at the end of Love & Other Drugs, calls to mind how Rock Hudson turns from playboy into neurosurgeon to cure Jane Wyman’s blindness in Magnificent Obsession – an association that’s another illustration of how little distance Zwick’s film has travelled from love stories of another era.)

    At the start of the film, Jamie’s family is celebrating.  His younger brother Josh has just become an internet millionaire and it’s through Josh that the hitherto shiftless Jamie gets to be a Pfizer trainee.   Shortly afterwards (in screen time anyway), Josh’s girlfriend leaves him and he moves into Jamie’s apartment.  At one point, Jamie says, ‘I thought you were supposed to be rich.  Why are you sleeping on my sofa?’   Screenwriters sometimes seem to think that admitting the absurdity of a situation is enough to make it real.   The only reason Josh stays on in the flat and Jamie’s life is to keep the dim laughs coming:  he epitomises what’s comedically objectionable about Love & Other Drugs.    Played monotonously by Josh Gad, Josh is fat and graceless – the unattractive polar opposite of his brother – and increasingly sexually frustrated.  Jamie and Maggie record their love-making; one night, Jamie comes home to find Josh masturbating as he watches the recording.  People in the Richmond Odeon audience reacted with disgust to this but it made me wonder how much that had to do with Josh’s being physically unpleasant:  we seem meant to accept the couple’s recording their lovemaking as not only sensible – something to keep for a rainy day – but poignant.  Yet at the same time – and again because Josh looks the way he does – his behaviour can be easily dismissed.   A few minutes later, the audience were back to laughing incontinently at him.   Other targets of the film’s humour include mousy secretaries who might struggle to get a date and tramps visiting dumpsters for the packs of Prozac that Jamie’s disposed of there (as part of his underhand campaign on behalf of Pfizer’s rival product Zoloft).   In fact, just about everyone in Love & Other Drugs turns out to be a self-serving creep and/or sex maniac – apart from the noble, funny, great-looking heroine and hero.

    While Jamie is attending a pharmaceutical convention in Chicago, Maggie’s trembling hands, as she gets coffee from a vending machine, are recognised by a woman who gives her a flyer for a Parkinson’s convention on the other side of the street.  Maggie goes and listens to fellow sufferers telling how they cope.  (I assume these people were the real thing rather than actors, which may be why Anne Hathaway, in the reaction shots of Maggie in the audience, seems to be laughing too much or gazing too admiringly at the humour and fortitude coming from the platform.)   Edward Zwick, a commercially dependable director, knows what he’s doing in this sequence.  He’s allowing the film’s audience to flatter themselves into thinking they’ve watched a serious description of what it’s like to have Parkinson’s.  Maggie texts Jamie to say where she is; he comes over and gets into a conversation with a man whose wife has had the disease for decades.  The husband has continued loyally to love and care for his wife but he advises Jamie to get out of his relationship with a Parkinson’s sufferer while he can.   Because Zwick encourages everyone in his cast to play emphatically, this moment lacks the startling matter-of-factness it needs but it’s still pretty strong.  I was briefly hopeful that Jamie might heed the man’s advice – might discover there were pragmatic limits to his altruism.  That would have been a tough-minded conclusion to the story (and have given Gyllenhaal and Hathaway some interesting scenes to play).  But the hybrid Love & Other Drugs wants it both ways – to squeeze every drop of misery out of incurable disease but deliver a happy ending appropriate to a rom-com.  As we left the cinema, I saw a few people wiping tears from their eyes, clearly delighted to have been moved in more ways than one.  This is a feelbad-feelgood movie.

    As Jamie’s Pfizer colleague, Oliver Platt looks much more like Josh Gad’s elder brother than Jake Gyllenhaal does.  (Also like Gad, Platt overacts, even though it’s higher-grade overacting.)  A more remarkable feature of the casting is that Love & Other Drugs features, as well as Jill Clayburgh, George Segal.  This is a doubly welcome event in principle but a pointless exercise in practice, stuck as they both are with a couple of minutes’ screen time, as Jamie’s parents.   I hope Zwick didn’t involve Clayburgh because she’d had a terminal illness for many years.  She died a few weeks before the film was released in the US and it’s dedicated to her.

    2 January 2011

  • Concussion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Landesman (2015)

    In 2005, a Nigerian-American neuropathologist called Bennet Omalu, with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, published in the journal Neurosurgery a paper entitled ‘Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [CTE] in a National Football League Player’ and called for further research into the disease.  Concussion, written and directed by Peter Landesman (Parkland, Kill the Messenger), is the story of how Omalu took on the might of the NFL and its vested interests to establish a link between American football and CTE.   The film’s opening scene takes place in a court of law.  Omalu is in the witness box, about to give expert evidence.  He is asked first to state his medical qualifications and reels off a list of degrees that’s meant to be almost comically lengthy.  Though the staging is clumsy, Will Smith as Omalu conveys an engaging eccentricity which survives into the immediately following sequences.  These show Omalu at work, talking affably to the dead bodies on which he’s doing autopsies. As soon as things start to get serious, however, Bennet Omalu’s individuality leaks away.  He becomes a-man-with-a-mission and Will Smith turns uninterestingly dignified.  (It’s possible that Smith felt he was on a mission too – to land at least a nomination for an Academy Award.)

    In response to criticisms of the film’s portrayal of one of the NFL players diagnosed with CTE, Peter Landesman has insisted that Concussion is ‘emotionally and spiritually accurate all the way through’.  One of the few moments that actually merits this description comes when Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), former team doctor to the Pittsburgh Steelers, is sufficiently exasperated by Omalu’s preachments to call him a ‘self-righteous son of a bitch’.  Otherwise, the picture is almost bereft of believable detail, in small things and large.  Omalu literally keeps making a point – his forefinger only centimetres away from the face of the person on the receiving end.  But no one ever tells him to stop the impassioned finger-jabbing:  it’s essential to the movie that exchanges like these are unmediated by the reality of human interaction. The main function of the other characters, regardless of the supposed animosity between them and Omalu, is to accept his irresistible arguments and help move the narrative on towards the hero’s vindication.  When his wife Prema (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) loses the baby she’s expecting as a result of the trauma of being stalked by NFL frighteners, she sheds a few tears before composedly reassuring her husband that they will have a family.  A few screen minutes earlier, we’d watched Omalu, while Prema slept, speaking quietly to their unborn child; there’s no follow-up to this in his upset at the miscarriage – even though there’s a horrible resonance with the earlier chattering away to corpses.  A couple of screen minutes later, the Omalus have one infant child and Prema is heavily pregnant with the next one.

    In this idealised marriage, Gugu Mbatha-Raw has little to do as Prema but keep reminding her husband how noble he is.  (She needn’t have bothered.  Will Smith seems already too aware of the fact.)  The film could have made something out of Bennet Omalu’s being (a) deeply religious and (b) uninterested in watching American football:  in the circumstances of his profession and his crusade, both of these are distinctive qualities.  Instead, his Christian faith is treated as a part of Omalu’s developing-world-origins delightfulness (the fervent desire to become a US citizen is another part of Peter Landesman’s patronising attitude towards his protagonist).  There are a couple of references to the profound cultural importance of the NFL, including a suggestion that, as a Sunday fixture, it’s displaced the church in many American lives but Landesman doesn’t bother to suggest what Bennet Omalu might have felt about that order of hebdomadal priorities.

    When material of this kind is turned into poor drama, it’s tempting to suggest (as Geoffrey Macnab in his Independent review of Concussion did suggest) that it should have been done as a documentary instead.  The standard response to this argument is that a based-on-actual-events mainstream movie with a big star in it will do much more than a documentary could to raise public awareness of important subject matter.   Landesman, although he may have been driven by a desire to bring Bennet Omalu to the attention of a mass audience, has carried out the job without imagination or even confidence in the story he’s telling.  Concussion purports to be a celebration of scientific research but it’s made by people who are clearly nervous about blinding-slash-boring with science so the detail of Omalu’s discoveries is strictly rationed.  Just about all we get is a succession of images of CT scans, and of shots of Omalu and others peering into microscopes and stepping back to register astonishment at what they’ve seen.  These are feeble clichés but the commercial thinking behind them is sound enough:  the film’s box-office takings now comfortably exceed its $35m budget.   Peter Landesman’s deference to the one-good-man-against-the-system movie formula is such that Concussion is eventually confusing, though.  When Omalu gives a climactic speech to an NFL conference on concussion, the respectful reactions of his audience express sheepish recognition that he was right all along, and indicate acceptance by the powers-that-be of his research findings and their implications.  But the sequence seems to have been included only because the public vindication scene is a standard requirement of this kind of moral drama.  The legends on the screen ahead of the closing credits suggest that the NFL engaged in a more protracted battle to keep in the dark what Omalu strove to bring to light.

    The cast also includes Albert Brooks, as Omalu’s supportive, principled boss, and Luke Wilson, as Roger Goodell, who takes over as NFL Commissioner at the height of Omalu’s campaign.  (Goodell remains in charge of the NFL today, ten years on.)  Among the various medics, Eddie Marsan, in a cameo appearance, brings a welcome jolt of individuality to proceedings.   Among the ex-players, David Morse registers particularly strongly as Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers center whose autopsy was the starting point of Bennet Omalu’s discoveries.  James Newton Howard’s score might be said to serve Peter Landesman’s purposes perfectly.  It’s relentlessly obvious.

    15 February 2016

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