Before I saw “Love and Other Drugs,” I must have seen the preview at least five times. I would still like to see the movie advertised in that preview. In the trailer, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a slick pharmaceutical sales rep who knows exactly how to get any woman to sleep with him—until he meets Anne Hathaway’s character, who manages to call him on all his womanizing schemes because she demonstrates exactly the same behavior. And from there, they manage to fall in love, with slight complications arising from the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jamie, becomes phenomenally successful with the boom in sales of Viagra.

Nowhere in the preview does it even mention that Anne Hathaway’s character, Maggie, has early-onset Parkinson’s disease. In fact, at one point it is specifically edited so that instead of saying, “You’re on the fast track. Six hundred girls dying to discuss sales techniques. You can’t do that with a sick person holding you back,” Maggie is simply saying, “You can’t do that with me holding you back.”

Why? Why would the producers of “Love and Other Drugs” work so hard to completely conceal what turns out to be the main premise of the movie? Maybe because they know that this premise just isn’t as exciting or as sexy as love in the time of Viagra.

Don’t get me wrong, Viagra does play a part in setting the scene for Jamie’s personal saga. The director tries to be really clever about framing erectile dysfunction as the body’s way of telling a man that he doesn’t really want to be having sex, and Viagra as a man’s way of fighting back against that biological dictate in order to have lots and lots of empty, meaningless sex. There is one frankly hilarious scene where the undeniably virile Jamie is force-fed Viagra before a three-way, and ends up having to go to the hospital with the dreaded “erection lasting longer than four hours.”

But the Viagra, the flirting games Jamie plays with various receptionists and fellow sales reps, the methods he employs to make sure that his drugs are selling better than anyone else’s, are all amusing sidebars to the main drama of the relationship between Jamie and Maggie. There is some great acting that goes on between two very attractive people, and they are even exploring a pretty interesting question: If you knew that the woman you loved was going to slowly lose her health, her ability to function on a basic level, and largely everything you loved about her, would you still be willing to stay with her? And if you knew that the man you loved would have to watch you waste away, and would eventually have to take complete control over your life, would you let him?

My biggest problem with “Love and Other Drugs” is that it can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. It introduces these big, life-changing questions and then sweeps them aside with a few romantic comedy clichés. I would be perfectly willing to see either the light-hearted love story about the guy who has to choose between a perfect life with a good career and all the bimbos he can bang, and the girl of his dreams; or the drama about the guy learning to live with the fact that the girl he loves has a terminal illness. But “Love and Other Drugs,” while both entertaining and touching at times, fails to do justice to either story.