Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) couldn’t find a girl he isn’t able to seduce. Maggie (Anne Hathaway) couldn’t find a relationship she’d want to hold on to. It’s a relationship made in youthful promiscuity heaven. But there’s a catch (movies usually need one). Jamie is a sleazy pharmaceutical salesman, and Maggie is a health care agnostic, hardened by her years dealing with early life Parkinson’s. It’s a topical odd couple made on the pages of Google News, and it delivers the story of romantic redemption promised: Jamie finally learns to love, just when he finds the girl who won’t let him stick around.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I think it’s not hard to anticipate what the gods of Hollywood convention have in store. Needless to say, before we get to the happy ending, we travel with Jamie and Maggie as move through their bumps. Love and Other Drugs is set in the late 1990s, on the eve of the release of Viagra. That was two economic bubbles ago, when times were good and the privileged youth had little to worry about. Jamie works for Pfizer in Ohio with his partner Bruce (Oliver Platt), a down and out salesman who is vying for his opportunity to be promoted to the Chicago office and be reunited with his family. Jamie’s good looks may be Bruce’s ticket. The charmer has a way with the office girls, and we spend a significant portion of the movie watching Jamie learn the ropes of his trade, using his seductive skills to get into doctors’ office supply rooms (and receptionists’ pants).

Then he meets Maggie, a wonderful one-night stand that turns into a two, three, and four night stand, and then a full-fledged relationship, before Maggie finally pushes him away. She’s hiding her disability, and even when Jamie proclaims that he is ready and willing to care for her, in spite of the trials that promises, Maggie doesn’t believe him and pushes harder. There is a brief stretch in Love and Other Drugs when this emotional tension begins to take hold. Jamie wanders into a convention of Parkinson’s patients and realizes the full, lifelong struggle that loving Maggie promises. The golden boy is a deer in headlights, caught in a real emotional crisis.

No worries, the pestering presence of this heartfelt conflict is treated with the conventions of love story making, complete with a melodramatic high speed chase in which Jamie drives his Porsche next to a bus headed to Canada where Maggie hopes to buy cheap drugs, proclaiming his love for her by yelling out the window.

Then there’s Josh. Almost unexplainably, Jamie’s generic brand Jack Black brother character, played by Josh Gad (The Rocker), shows up to live with him, even though Josh, the slobby, slovenly syringe meant to inject some comic relief into the movie, supposedly made millions in the dot com boom (a period of American economic history that now almost sounds almost as quaint in on screen references as the 1970s oil crisis). Josh Gad delivers the irritating potty humor he was hired to provide, including masturbating to his brother’s home made porno that stars the ever uninhibited Hathaway. This is all supposed to be cute and make us feel fuzzy. A happy pill, if you will. This Thanksgiving, however, I’ll stick hard liquor, thank you very much.