This was pitched as a romantic comedy but it isn’t, really – it’s rather a romantic drama, with some light moments and a bit of history thrown in. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a Hollywood film which changes tone so often – but somehow it seems to work, so full credit to Edward Zwick. It’s familiar in some ways to Zwick’s earlier thirtysomething. (And when you think about it the trouble-with-commitment drama-dy About Last Night.)
We start off in the mid 1990s, with Jake Gyllenhaul as a charming ne’er-do-well who finds himself flogging pharmaceuticals. Despite being ethic-less and attractive his career actually doesn’t really get going until viagara is introduced. This sounds a bit weird but is actually quite interesting, with some bright satire and information on how the system works in the US (I’m sure a similar sort of thing happens here too). Then he falls in love with Anne Hathaway who has Parkinsons – which again sounds weird but does work.
Hathaway is always likeable and here she’s naked a lot too. She’s not the best actor in the world. Gylenhall is more talented but he’s not as likeable. Those are highly subjective judgements I’m sure millions disagree with but what I mean to say is they even each other out.
More frustrating is that the support characters are so poorly sketched out – the brother (an IT rich guy who goes bust) is just three for repetitive comic beats, there are George Segal and Jill Clayburgh as Gyllenhaul’s parents but we only see them in one scene, Hank Azaria looks as though he’s about to do something meaningful as a doctor but it never comes.
Still, a lot better than I thought it was going to be.
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