Love & Other Drugs Directed by Edward Zwick Welcome to the Rileys Directed by Jake Scott Anne Hathaway’s smartass Parkinson’s patient; Kristen Stewart’s messy stripper

Love & Other Drugs is half eager romantic comedy, half earnest drama. And neither of them quite work. Though nuggets of the story are interesting—young woman with early-onset Parkinson’s wants sex and nothing more from a playboy who falls for her—its execution is too clichéd and, as a result, too taxing for the good stuff to transcend the tropes.

Director-co-writer Edward Zwick’s adaptation of the memoir Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman opens in 1996 with a smooth electronics hawker named Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) getting fired for boning his boss’ girlfriend. Stuck without a trade while his portly, comic-relief younger brother, Josh (Josh Gad), gets rich from the Internet bubble, Jamie eventually tries pharmaceutical sales. Of course, he’s initially terrible at it. Of course, he quickly gets better. So good, in fact, that he sweet-talks a doctor (Hank Azaria) into letting him shadow him for a day so he can more aggressively push his product, Zoloft.

This never-in-a-million-years set-up leads to a meeting with Maggie (Anne Hathaway), who sees the doctor for an emergency refill of her Parkinson’s medication when her apartment is burglarized—and whips out her boob so he can also take a look at a weird mark she’s found. Maggie figures out that Jamie’s a sham and goes off on him for the first of a seemingly endless number of times. You see, Maggie’s tough and independent, and the only way to show this is to have her deliver huge, smartass monologues that no other human being would be able to rattle off without lots of rehearsal. It takes Jamie about five seconds to fall in love, even if at first he claims to be ecstatic about the fact that Maggie’s just interested in casual sex.

Add moon eyes to wackiness (Maggie unwittingly getting naked in front of Josh, the introduction of Viagra set to “Heaven Is a Place on Earth”) and you’ve got another tired rom-com, albeit one with pretty steamy and frequent sex. (Princess Diaries fans, get ready to see your sweet royal bare all.) The moment the sheen wears off the relationship, however, is stellar: Though Maggie’s first-stage disease is mostly under control, she has a bad day that’s made worse when she runs out of medication. She gets drunk, pushes Jamie away, falls to her knees, and sobs when her shaking hands drop a glass. It’s more startling than melodramatic, and after an overdose of Maggie’s I-am-a-rock attitude, a welcome glimpse of vulnerability.

A meeting in which Parkinson’s patients much worse off than Maggie share their stories is similarly affecting, but Zwick isn’t content with middle-of-the-road emotion. There have to be sweeping gestures and big speeches, now courtesy of Jamie. Still, his mushiness toward the end of the film trumps Maggie’s ballsiness at the beginning, if only because her situation is so sympathetic.

The best part of Love & Other Drugs is the sizzling chemistry of Gyllenhaal and Hathaway, who played a married couple in Brokeback Mountain and are electric here whether they’re fighting or falling in love. If only grandstanding weren’t so central to their relationship.

Welcome to the Rileys Directed by Jake Scott

Kristen Stewart’s stripper film, otherwise known as Welcome to the Rileys, is an underwritten bit of skeezy morosity disguised as a heartwarming family drama. The directorial debut of Jake Scott, son of Ridley, is set mostly in New Orleans and weighs on the viewer like a humid Louisiana day, languidly moving toward its inevitable conclusion with its few unexpected developments in all the wrong places.

The film’s biggest surprise is Melissa Leo, who’s proved herself a chameleon in recent projects and is practically unrecognizable here as an agoraphobic June Cleaver, all pearls, sweater sets, and perfectly waved blond hair. Wife of distant, philandering husband Doug (James Gandolfini), Lois Riley is always all dressed up but unable to leave her home, even to the end of her Indianapolis driveway to pick up the mail. A dead daughter certainly has something to do with it; Doug’s affair and the couple’s apparent lack of communication surely doesn’t help.

But the daughter isn’t the only ghost haunting this story. At the very beginning of the film, Doug’s lover dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. When he visits her grave as well as that of his little girl, he notices that Lois took the liberty of buying tombstones for the two of them as well. It’s all too much for him to take, so when his business takes him to the Big Easy, he decides not to come home for a while. His reason isn’t another affair but Mallory (Stewart), a dancer/prostitute who reminds him of his daughter and, in his mind, is silently begging for salvation. (Mallory’s also got a dead mother. This is one mournful bunch.) So he moves into her squalid apartment—strippers, apparently, can’t live anywhere decent, nor comb their hair nor fix their makeup—and tries to clean up both the place and his surrogate daughter’s life.

Scripter Ken Hixon frames New Orleans as a place where miracles happen. When Doug announces that he’s not coming back, Lois suddenly gets the guts to go after him, hyperventilating during the whole drive from Indiana until she gets to the busy French Quarter and is suddenly—and unbelievably—free of her phobia. Doug’s reaction to her surprise visit is rather suspect, as well. But maybe Mallory, with her attitude, overt sluttiness, bruises, and hair-flipping (this is Stewart, remember), is good for him, too!

To be fair, regardless of Stewart’s actorly tics, she’s terrific as the raw, damaged Mallory, never once calling to mind her superficially angsty Bella. Leo’s performance is marred only by her character’s jagged arc. Gandolfini fares the worst, putting on an odd, sorta-Louisiana accent that’s not always there, though Doug’s compulsion to help Mallory and his resulting satisfaction/anger (depending on how his mission is going) always feels realistic.

An invasive, precious score, mostly during Lois’s solo scenes to, one guesses, signify her craziness, grates along with the film’s slow pace. Just as Doug sees a good girl in Mallory, viewers can spy a decent, moving film here. But both need work.