REVIEW: Anne Hathaway Proves Just How Fearless She Really Is in Love and Other Drugs

But Gyllenhaal isn't the reason to see Love and Other Drugs. (It also doesn't help that the great George Segal and the late -- and great -- Jill Clayburgh are wasted in tiny cardboard roles.) The only reason to bother with Love and Other Drugs is to see yet another facet of Anne Hathaway's fearlessness. Hathaway gave a piercing, and surprising, performance in Jonathan Demme's otherwise wearisome Rachel Getting Married. Her role here demands less of her -- and yet in some ways requires her to give more.

Whenever I first see Anne Hathaway in a movie, it takes me a while to adjust to her face. Here, her dense, dark curls have been stolen from a Rossetti painting, but her face is pure, Picasso-like exaggeration: How can so many oversized features -- the pillowy lips, the Roswell-alien eyes -- possibly fit on one face? This time around, Hathaway isn't playing a princess or a deeply troubled basket case, and you can tell she's not quite sure how to navigate this character: In rendering her lines, she's a little too game, a little too peppy, channeling the good-time girl with a sad little heart. She goes at the role like gangbusters, when what she really needs to do is dial it down.

But she is fearless about taking her clothes off, and that's an increasing rarity among actresses today. Maybe given the mostly metaphorical nakedness of her performance in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, what Hathaway does here shouldn't be surprising. But I think it's harder for a serious actress -- or, to be more specific, one who wants to be taken seriously -- to do nude scenes than it is to peel back any number of emotional layers. Most actresses who want to be stars and/or serious actresses (for simplicity's sake, let's assume the two are the same) refuse to do nudity, even when not doing it might render a performance nonsensical. Natalie Portman repeatedly and primly asserts that she'll never do nudity (which made her the world's coyest stripper in Mike Nichols' Closer); in the last days of Sex and the City -- the enjoyable HBO series, not the horrific movie franchise -- Sarah Jessica Parker refused to show her breasts, while all three of her co-stars would at least occasionally oblige. While the choice of appearing nude is, of course, a personal one for an actress, the subtext of so many of these staunch refusals is, "Leave it to the slutty girls to show their tits; I'm serious about my craft."

What Hathaway does in Love and Other Drugs is an implicit strike against that view. Nude scenes are difficult to do -- they can be stressful not just for the performers but for the crew -- but Hathaway makes sure the strain doesn't show. Zwick and cinematographer Steven Fierberg are respectful of her. She's carefully and discreetly shot -- it's not that every body part is hanging out every minute. But there's no prim bedsheet-bandeau, no Carrie Bradshaw-style bra-as-nightwear.

Hathaway's physical charms are considerable. She's tiny but voluptuous, with none of those scary, pointy collarbones in evidence. And her carriage is just relaxed and unstudied, predicated maybe on just good common sense: When two people get into bed to enjoy each other, it's only natural that they ought to be naked.

If Hathaway's overall performance here is awkward in some ways, there's certainly no prissiness about her. And for a star of her caliber -- she's a regular on the cover of Vogue, for Pete's sake -- that's a risky choice, not a safe one. The world has always been judgmental about sluts and good girls, and the movies too often reinforce our worst impulses. Hathaway is having none of that. Now we know just how serious she really is.

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