It was said of the zoologist and public intellectual Lord (Solly) Zuckerman that the spur to his considerable ambition came from his name always being at the bottom of alphabetical lists in his youth. He thus set out to be at the top of lists compiled on merit. One wonders if the American writer-director-producer Edward Zwick, who is the last name in Katz's Film Encyclopedia and next to last in Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, feels the same way. Most of his films have striven to get out of the Hollywood rut and say something about American society and world events, starting with Thirtysomething, the TV series that made his name. He co-produced Shakespeare in Love and Traffic; his finest movie as director, Glory, centred on the first black regiment to fight in the American civil war, and later films tackled such subjects as the relationship between Islamic terrorism and excessive national security (The Siege) and the illicit diamond trade in war-torn Africa (Blood Diamond).

　　 Zwick's new film treats another topical subject, the vastly profitable pharmaceutical industry, not in the openly accusatory fashion of the 2005 version of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, but through a romantic comedy of a peculiarly wry sort. The film is inspired by Jamie Reidy's Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, a comic, non-fiction work. After slacking his way through the conservative Catholic university of Notre Dame and several years as an army officer, Reidy worked in the 1990s for Pfizer and Eli Lilly, America's two largest pharmaceutical companies, becoming their top salesman in the midwest for the new sexual superdrug. He claims not to have been a whistle-blower exposing the dubious practices of Big Pharma, but was immediately fired when senior executives read his book.

　　 In the hands of Zwick and his co-writers, Jamie Reidy becomes Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal), the black sheep of a medical family, who learns that there's a fortune to be made in the burgeoning pharmaceutical business and signs on for Pfizer's training course. In a hilarious sequence Randall attends Pfizer's boot camp, where slick travelling salesmen are indoctrinated in the justification of their profession. They're taught the art of manipulating doctors and exploiting their staff and such tricks as hinting at the product's additional properties for which no proof has yet been established. Then the cheerfully amoral Randall brings his skills as a silver-tongued salesman and his sexual magnetism, first practised selling TV sets and hi-fi equipment, to bear on peddling patent medicines.

　　 It's a less earnest and self-consciously moral replay of Wall Street, and with none of the customary contempt for advertising and merchandising that liberal audiences take away from Death of a Salesman and Mad Men. Initially, he and the older, less charismatic salesman (Oliver Platt) who accompanies him are promoting Pfizer's Zoloft in competition with rival Eli Lilly's more successful Prozac. （英语影评）In a clever running gag, Randall hijacks samples of Prozac from doctors' offices and dumps them in a parking lot wheelie bin from which they're lifted by a hobo, whose life is thereby transformed. Having soothed the nation with anti-depressants, Randall embarks upon a campaign to cater for the nation's failing sexual libido with Pfizer's Viagra and strikes the mother lode. That Pfizer and Lilly have allowed their names to be used in the picture is astonishing and an indication that the movie's account of the business is reasonably accurate.

　　 Gyllenhaal has thrown away that dark cloud of anxiety and moral seriousness that usually hangs over him like a halo and, for a while at least, we delight in his character's unscrupulous activities as Casanova and conman. But Zwick and co have grafted on to their satirically lite version of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross a love story that inevitably brings to mind the lachrymose 1970 movie that was actually called Love Story. In the course of his work, Randall meets the free-spirited 26-year-old Maggie Murdock (the beautiful Anne Hathaway, who played opposite Gyllenhaal so memorably in Brokeback Mountain). An artist and part-time waitress, she's suffering from early-onset Parkinson's disease, and they embark on a no-strings-attached affair of mutually satisfying carnality. She doesn't want a serious liaison with someone who might either leave her or be stuck with her as a hopeless dependent, and he doesn't want to make a commitment that will limit his freewheeling lifestyle. The relationship is handled with a refreshing frankness, candour and humour.

　　 This aspect of the movie also enables Zwick to make points about the complex nature of public health, the difference between what can be cured and what must be accepted, the venality of American doctors and the pharmaceutical companies, and the inadequacies and inequities of the American medical system. Yet the two narrative strands don't quite mesh, and the movie stumbles badly when trying to effect the redemption of Randall through love. There's an excruciating scene of a sort only too familiar in Hollywood romantic comedies and in the work of our own exponent of the genre, Richard Curtis: Randall in his expensive European sports car overtakes the charabanc Maggie has hired to take hard-pressed senior citizens to buy affordable medicines up in Canada and proposes to her, loudly and publicly, in a roadside car park.

　　 There's nothing in Love & Other Drugs quite as funny or as sharp as a cartoon in the current New Yorker. A pair of Godzilla-like monsters are stalking the streets of midtown Manhattan, each grinning and clutching two fistfuls of citizens from which they're taking generous bites. One says to the other: "Of course you're cheerful. These things are loaded with anti-depressants."