50/50
Jonathan Levine
The story: Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young man who does not drink and does not smoke. So the news that he has a rare form of cancer comes as an unexpected shock. He deals with it with help from his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), a counsellor younger than himself, Katie (Anna Kendrick), and his concerned mother (Anjelica Huston). The title refers to the chances of survival for someone with Adam’s condition.
It is official – you can crack jokes about cancer now.
On the small screen, acclaimed actress Laura Linney helms the Showtime comedy The Big C, which has been renewed for a third season.
And now on the big screen, there are characters using cancer as a pick-up line and as punch-lines.
When Adam first tells his best friend his bad news, Kyle’s reaction is: “Celebrities beat cancer all the time. Lance Armstrong, he keeps getting it,” and then, “if you were a casino game, you would have the best odds”.
Even Adam’s chemotherapy sessions feel like a cosy boys’ club with the good-natured ribbing by old-timers Alan (Philip Baker Hall) and Mitch (Matt Frewer).
But then a sudden death is a stark reminder that this is cancer here and the stakes are no less than life itself.
Scribe Will Reiser adapted his own experience with cancer for the script and he does a nice job in balancing the comedy with the anger, the fear and the frustration felt by the patient.
And it certainly helps to have Gordon-Levitt in the lead role. The actor has managed to escape the curse of being a young star on a hit TV show – Third Rock From The Sun (1996-2001) – and built a credible career based on indie films as diverse as the sexual abuse drama Mysterious Skin (2004) and the romantic comedy (500) Days Of Summer (2009).
Adam might not always be a nice guy but Gordon-Levitt keeps him real and grounded in a way that makes you care about what happens to him.
As Kyle, Rogen veers a little too close to the sweet-but-crude dude he has played before in raucous comedies such as Zack And Miri Make A Porno (2008) and Knocked Up (2007). But the friendship between the two men is touching and believable. Perhaps it helps that Rogen and Reiser are best friends in real life.
Kendrick, so memorable in the drama Up In The Air (2009), is adorable as the counsellor who is so young that she does not get Adam’s Doogie Howser reference. (Doogie Howser, M.D. was a 1989-1993 TV series about a teenage doctor.)
She finds herself caring for Adam beyond just seeing him as a patient and the film moves into romance territory when Adam’s self-absorbed girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) gets out of the picture.
A romantic comedy with cancer sounds like an even worse idea than a comedy about the illness. But thanks to the actors, the writing and director Jonathan Levine’s light touch, 50/50 is not half bad.
(ST)