Better Living Through Chemistry

A pharmacologist who pilfers from his own stash doesn’t make for much of a story. It’s over-the-counter, flat, hypocritical and none-too-interesting. Love & Other Drugs tried to walk that (similar) line by throwing in a satirical skewering of the pharmaceutical biz with a heavy dose of amour while Better Living Through Chemistry tacks into it with a whacky rom-com skew, and as with the launch of any new panacea, the results are mixed, and some even concerning. The diagnosis of which leads directly to the writing/directing team of Geoff Moore and David Posamentier, who treat their cinematic go as an alchemy experiment, crushing in a Body Heat-styled femme fatale element along with pill-popping madness, dysfunctional youth mania and alpha female hen-pecking all blended together under a quirky Wes Anderson-like sheen.
The elixir that the two filmmakers do possess however, is Sam Rockwell, who’s consistently been able to render characters on the brink of madness with convincing aplomb. He plumbed the provocative depths of Chuck Barris’s gonzo faux memoir in George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and delivered split personalities in Duncan Jones’s Moon. More recently he played an impish big brother figure in The Way, Way Back. As Douglas Varney, Rockwell plays a sheepish man whose realization of the American dream hasn’t quite gone as planned. Knuckled under to his wife Kara (a lean Michelle Monaghan) whose father has recently bequeathed the family pharmacy to him (the rebranding of the store becomes a major sticking point) and with a twelve-year-old son, Ethan (Harrison Holzer), who’s a reclusive angry Goth with fecal issues, Doug has much to contend with. And then there’s Elizabeth (Olivia Wilde), the comely trophy wife who likes her prescriptions filled in person at her large, vacuous manse while a few wine spritzers are consumed.