This movie would like to be a moving commentary about love knowing no bounds, but it just ends up being another tired "boy meets girl, boy loses girl..." formula. This is combined with the "jerk meets woman who makes him care about people" (a la any Hugh Grant movie) storyline. Add a gross, immature male sidekick--ostensibly for comic relief--straight from a Judd Apatow movie and you have two hours of tedium.
The woman in this case has Parkinson's disease, but despite the initial impression that this is going to make and shape the story, it actually plays a small role. Anne Hathaway's hands shake in a few scenes, and then she stumbles a bit, but in the rest of the movie she's as fine as ever. We have one scene where we meet other Parkinson's sufferers, but that's as close we get to addressing her affliction. The next minute, she's back in bed with Jake, acting as unafflicted as ever.
The movie is full of sex jokes that often fall flat and dialogue that is supposed to be funny and isn't--mainly because the punchlines are often unintelligible. A quasi-orgy scene near the end makes no sense to the story and seems to serve only as an excuse for a few more sex jokes.
The ending is completely removed from reality, as Anne Hathaway's character goes against the instincts she has trusted throughout. In real life, what her boyfriend does would be considered stalking. But this is Hollywood, and we must have a romantic speech from the man about how he desperately needs her (And yes--we even have an angel chorus as the music swells! At least the filmmakers didn't have the people on the bus break into applause--I'll give them that.). But true love doesn't come from need, it comes from want. And it seems to imply that no matter how strongly an independent woman rejects a man's advances, all he needs to do is to keep harassing her, and eventually she'll come around--because she's not capable of knowing what she really wants, and she needs him to point it out to her.
I really didn't want the movie to end the way it did. It would have been much more interesting for both the audience--and the characters--to have kept on trying to figure things out. The ending speech says nothing more than he's already told her; alas, this time, she finally capitulates. I asked myself, Why? Good movies usually have the main characters showing some sort of growth and learning. But here, both characters regress: Anne's character doesn't stick to her guns, and Jake's character ends up codependent, needing her to fill up his empty life. Seeing them several years down the road and how Jake reacts to Anne's increasing feebleness would have added substantially to how we felt about both of them. As it was, they were merely two attractive people in lust with each other.
A second plot line is about drug companies and the way they work to make money rather than care for people. In fact, the first part of the movie has some very entertaining scenes between Jake and his supervisor as we learn how callously corrupt the industry is. Just the fact that Jake knows this already, and is willing to speak out about it, is compelling and attractive. But this goes nowhere. Late in the movie, as Jake is trying to help Anne with her disease and investigates cures, he suddenly stops his efforts for no plausible reason.
It's generally poor form to critique a movie for what it isn't as opposed to what it is. But the filmmakers have churned out a melodrama that wants to be a comedy that wants to be a melodrama, so it's hard to know what it is. Revealing the health care industry's inner workings, coupled with the Parkinson's story in light of the romance could have made for both an entertaining and thoughtful movie. What I thought was to be a love story with a sad twist, turned into a storyline as old as the hills. Using Parkinson's as a plot point but then not doing anything with it was quite clumsy. The disease thus becomes a MacGuffin in that it didn't have much to do with the story. You could have had the same storyline minus the malady, and it would have been basically the same movie.
Overall, I left feeling empty-handed and wondering what I'd just seen.
The woman in this case has Parkinson's disease, but despite the initial impression that this is going to make and shape the story, it actually plays a small role. Anne Hathaway's hands shake in a few scenes, and then she stumbles a bit, but in the rest of the movie she's as fine as ever. We have one scene where we meet other Parkinson's sufferers, but that's as close we get to addressing her affliction. The next minute, she's back in bed with Jake, acting as unafflicted as ever.
The movie is full of sex jokes that often fall flat and dialogue that is supposed to be funny and isn't--mainly because the punchlines are often unintelligible. A quasi-orgy scene near the end makes no sense to the story and seems to serve only as an excuse for a few more sex jokes.
The ending is completely removed from reality, as Anne Hathaway's character goes against the instincts she has trusted throughout. In real life, what her boyfriend does would be considered stalking. But this is Hollywood, and we must have a romantic speech from the man about how he desperately needs her (And yes--we even have an angel chorus as the music swells! At least the filmmakers didn't have the people on the bus break into applause--I'll give them that.). But true love doesn't come from need, it comes from want. And it seems to imply that no matter how strongly an independent woman rejects a man's advances, all he needs to do is to keep harassing her, and eventually she'll come around--because she's not capable of knowing what she really wants, and she needs him to point it out to her.
I really didn't want the movie to end the way it did. It would have been much more interesting for both the audience--and the characters--to have kept on trying to figure things out. The ending speech says nothing more than he's already told her; alas, this time, she finally capitulates. I asked myself, Why? Good movies usually have the main characters showing some sort of growth and learning. But here, both characters regress: Anne's character doesn't stick to her guns, and Jake's character ends up codependent, needing her to fill up his empty life. Seeing them several years down the road and how Jake reacts to Anne's increasing feebleness would have added substantially to how we felt about both of them. As it was, they were merely two attractive people in lust with each other.
A second plot line is about drug companies and the way they work to make money rather than care for people. In fact, the first part of the movie has some very entertaining scenes between Jake and his supervisor as we learn how callously corrupt the industry is. Just the fact that Jake knows this already, and is willing to speak out about it, is compelling and attractive. But this goes nowhere. Late in the movie, as Jake is trying to help Anne with her disease and investigates cures, he suddenly stops his efforts for no plausible reason.
It's generally poor form to critique a movie for what it isn't as opposed to what it is. But the filmmakers have churned out a melodrama that wants to be a comedy that wants to be a melodrama, so it's hard to know what it is. Revealing the health care industry's inner workings, coupled with the Parkinson's story in light of the romance could have made for both an entertaining and thoughtful movie. What I thought was to be a love story with a sad twist, turned into a storyline as old as the hills. Using Parkinson's as a plot point but then not doing anything with it was quite clumsy. The disease thus becomes a MacGuffin in that it didn't have much to do with the story. You could have had the same storyline minus the malady, and it would have been basically the same movie.
Overall, I left feeling empty-handed and wondering what I'd just seen.