Cancer is a pretty good hook for a movie. It’s about the worst thing in the world, so when you make a film about a deadly disease, you know that it’s going to have plenty of inherent drama whether you’re really any good at making movies or not. But there are some problems you have to watch out for. You can’t just wallow in the fear and sadness that comes from battling the illness or your movie will be too draining for your audience to sit through. You have to be careful when you’re handling lighter moments too. You don’t want to try to shoehorn goofy comedy next to serious material and confuse the tone of the film. And you’ve got to worry about not emotionally manipulating your audience. It would be too easy to squeeze some tears out of the paying customer by having people die while sappy music plays and all their loved ones react in slow motion. You have to let the drama of the situation flow naturally from your characters and give the scenes room to breathe, not create false drama and shove it down the viewers’ throats in a tacky, sappy display of disease porn.
Those are some of the big things that a cancer movie can do wrong. 50/50 manages to do none of them, so I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. This movie has a nice mix of comedy and drama, neither one taking over completely, but without the juxtaposition of conflicting emotions confusing the tone either. Director Jonathan Levine lets the comedy or the tragedy flow naturally from his characters and how they would react when in certain situations. He trusts his actors, and his screenwriter Will Reiser (who penned this movie after his own battles with cancer) to inject the appropriate amount of gags or dramatics, and he doesn’t overly craft his scenes to tip his hat to the viewer about how he wants them to respond to what they’re watching. 50/50 is simply a story about people, it doesn’t stumble around trying to find its identity.
But where it does stumble a bit is in finding it’s purpose. The main character is a 27-year-old guy named Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who discovers early in the film that he is suffering from a rare form of spinal cancer. He’s told that he has a 50/50 shot of coming out of the ordeal alive, and the story is about how he deals with the disease and how his struggles affect his friends, family, and the people he meets along the way. Battling a life threatening disease is a journey in itself, certainly, but what I couldn’t quite grasp is why I was watching this particular character go through these experiences. Adam felt like a regular guy, I identified with his behavior and how he reacted to things quite a bit; but I never got a sense of what his particular worldview was, how dealing with cancer changed it, or why this particular guy getting cancer made for a good movie. I don’t think there is an adequate answer to those questions, so while following Adam was always engaging enough to keep from being boring, it lacked the tension and stakes that make for a truly great story. There is some natural tension in whether Adam will survive or not, but that question lingers in the background more than it serves as the driving force of the narrative. There is a lot of time spent focusing on Adam’s romantic entanglements, but ultimately this feels more like a cancer movie than it does a relationship drama. What you’re left with is mostly just a movie about a guy and his stoner friend hanging out; oh, and he also happens to have cancer. A better structured story arc would have bumped things up a notch.
What we do get is pretty good on its own, though, and that’s largely because of the cast chosen to bring these characters to life. The three most important characters in the film are Adam, his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), and a pretty young grad student who acts as his therapist during treatment named Katherine (Anna Kendrick). Gordon-Levitt plays a great everyman. He’s attractive enough to be a movie star, but not such an adonis that he doesn’t feel like someone you know. You can put yourself in his shoes if you’re a guy, or imagine him as your boyfriend if you’re a lady. Despite being mostly a subdued person that deals with his problems internally, Adam does go through a series of experiences that see him running the gamut from a general malaise, to a period of fear, a period of anger, and even a few moments of revelatory understanding. Gordon-Levitt is able to make every situation play natural, work as a cohesive whole, and never feel showy or look like dramatic acting. Cancer movies tempt actors to go big, but instead he wisely reins it in.
Seth Rogen is Seth Rogen. I’ve never really seen him do much outside of his wheelhouse, and by now you’ve decided whether you like his comedic schtick or not. Personally I enjoy it, and I think he’s proven over time that he is able to handle dramatic moments without embarrassing himself as well, so I found him to be a good choice to play Adam’s main foil. I especially enjoyed a scene where Kyle confronts Adam about what a terrible person his girlfriend is. He was comedically blunt in his approach and I can’t imagine many actors other than Rogen being able to make scene play as funny, but not ludicrous. Anna Kendrick is just so charming and relatable. And she’s a great actress too. While I found the convenience of Adam finding this girl just as he needs her to come a little too close to Hollywood cliche, Kendrick is able to inject Katherine with enough quirks and foibles that she never comes off as a cheesy dream girl sent in to save the day. Her budding relationship with Adam is very difficult, a mine field of conflicting emotions, and watching Kendrick react to where Gordon-Levitt takes their scenes was probably my favorite part of the film.
In addition to the three main characters, we also get a host of supporting characters made up of Adam’s girlfriend, his mother, and some fellow patients that he meets while enduring chemotherapy. Bryce Dallas Howard and Anjelica Houston play the self-centered girlfriend and the nagging mother. They play the roles well, but they’re put in the thankless position of playing one note characters that don’t really have anywhere to go other than the places they start. Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer are charming as Adam’s older buddies on the cancer ward, but their characters felt too pointedly written to be charming. They didn’t feel like real people so much as they did movie characters and their bits were the one aspect of the film where I felt like I was being manipulated into feeling something rather than just watching a situation play out organically. But really, for a movie about cancer, that’s not bad at all.
Ultimately, whether or not this movie succeeds comes down to two things: whether you’re emotionally engaged when Adam goes into his either doomed or life saving surgery, and whether or not you get some laughs on the journey to that point. The humor, while never quite side-splitting, largely worked for me and felt appropriate to the characters rather than coming off as a “comedy about cancer” attention seeking gimmick. And when Adam is on the gurney, being wheeled into the operating room, I gotta say I was with him 100%. I might even go as far as to say I got a little choked up, if that wasn’t completely embarrassing.
