Love and Other Drugs

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Love and Other Drugs is a 2010 Sex Comedy movie about a Viagra salesman who falls in love with a young woman who suffers from Parkinson's Disease; they start a relationship based on sex but end up actually falling in love with each other, to their mutual chagrin. It may best be known for starring Anne Hathaway, star of such Girl Next Door roles as The Princess Diaries movies, and for the amount of nudity and sex scenes in the film, to the point it can almost be considered Porn with Plot.

A minor subplot involves Jamie's fat, nerdy brother Josh who is kicked out of the house by his lover and moves in with Jake, disrupting his intimate life. Hilarity Ensues.

Tropes used in Love and Other Drugs include:
  • Bittersweet Ending: Sure, Jake and Maggie end up together, but they're both very much aware that she will eventually lose all physical and mental coordination.
  • Bowdlerise: The Spanish subtitles are hilarious because they have all the swear words censored... in a film with graphic sex scenes. It seems talking about sex is bad, but not showing it!
  • Broken Aesop: it's a little hard to take the message that "Love is more important than sex" seriously when most of your film is about people having sex or talking about having sex.
  • The Charmer: Jamie even lampshades it, delightfully enough.

Jamie: You're gonna like me eventually. Everyone does.

  • Defrosting Ice Queen: Subverted. Jamie eventually does convince Maggie to be his girlfriend, but she doesn't change her behavior until the very end.
  • Diagnosis From Dr. Badass: Trey tells Jamie EXACTLY what type of pain he's delivering.
  • Mr. Fanservice: Whether Jamie or Jake does it for you is up to you.
  • Fan Service: Both leads spend about half the movie butt naked.
  • The Film of the Book: The original book was actually a non-fictional retelling of the history of Viagra.
  • Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: And also shameless.
  • Good Times Montage
  • Good People Have Good Sex: Despite how sex-obessessed the characters are, nothing kinkier than oral is even discussed.
  • Hot and Cold: Maggie is a classic case.
  • Ill Girl
  • Immodest Orgasm: Many.
  • Ladykiller in Love: This is what the movie is about, and what makes it sweet.
  • The Loins Sleep Tonight: It's about a Viagra salesman.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jamie is this, though it takes a while for even him to realize it. Maggie can be something of a bitch, too.
  • Oscar Bait
  • Playing Against Type: Even for the director, Ed Zwick, the movie is a departure from his Oscar bait fare, but harks back to his very early work.
  • Present Day Past: There's the introduction of Viagra and Prozac, and there's the bit with 90s ghettoblasters at the start. Nothing else sets this is '96. One character justifies being addicted to internet porn by saying "Isn't everybody?" No, not in '96 they weren't. Not even in '97. Seriously, cast your mind back to how much porn there was on the internet when the first Grand Theft Auto came out. There's even a scene Josh compares Jamie's penis to the Eye of Sauron, back before there was a common consensus on what that actually looked like, it being 5 years before The Lord of the Rings was a movie.
  • Product Placement: For Pfizer and their products (mostly Viagra), but its somewhat subverted in that the entire company comes off looking like a bunch of douchebags.
    • And lots of Bud and Bud Light abound.
  • Race For Your Love
  • Race Lift / All Asians Are Alike: One character makes a terrible, "sexy" pun about her friend's race as a lead-up to a threesome. "She's Thai, and I'm Thai-curious." Which is made worse by the fact that the girl is blatantly Filipino.
  • Sex Montage: Natch.
  • A Threesome Is Hot: Said threesome.
  • Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Josh and whatsername.
  • Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: The men in this film are jerks. Gyllenhaal's redeemed by The Power of Love.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: A homeless man keeps showing up to take the Prozac Jamie dumps in the trash and once makes an offhand comment that he has a job interview later before scampering off with the drugs. We had seen him take the drugs repeatedly, but the relevance of this fact is never addressed so the "job interview" comment is borderline Non Sequitur Scene.
    • It's a joke. He's been taking the Prozac and he got his life in order.