Movie review

Any romantic comedy about a Viagra salesman will understandably feel pressure to perform: Audiences will expect sex and raunchy humor along with the mushy stuff. "Love and Other Drugs" delivers, though it occasionally kills the mood by chattering when it should shut up.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Randall, a possible stand-in for Jamie Reidy, author of the 2005 memoir "Hard Sell," which inspired the movie. The year is 1996, and Jamie - med-school dropout, natural charmer, effortless womanizer - sees easy money in the booming pharmaceutical industry. After joining Pfizer he gets his first assignment: Take the Ohio River Valley region back from Eli Lilly.

No door-to-door for Jamie; he bribes a local doctor (Hank Azaria) and poses as an intern, the better to pitch directly to patients. That's how he meets Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a beautiful young woman with Parkinson's disease.

Maggie is a contrivance - who better to teach our selfish hero the value of sacrifice? - but Hathaway convincingly turns her into an emotionally distant short-timer who prefers casual sex to long-term love. Refreshingly, director and co-writer Edward Zwick ("About Last Night") abandons the usual candles-and-R&B routine; the two actors simply get intimate, comfortable and extremely naked.

Maggie has another affliction: She's a chronic deconstructionist. "This isn't about sex for you," she tells Jamie with typical dead-on accuracy, "it's about an hour or two of escaping the pain of being you." What we're actually hearing are the words of insecure screenwriters who want to analyze their characters before we can, which is a mistake. As any Viagra salesman would probably tell you, sometimes it's best to just relax.