If you caught a TV commercial for 50/50, you’d be forgiven for expecting standard Judd Apatow-esque fare with a macabre plot twist—spinal cancer—providing new and interesting ways for Seth Rogen and company to get laid and/or high. The marketing is a bit of a misrepresentation of the movie’s tone, but it’s not exactly A Walk To Remember, either. Toeing the line between these two emotional extremes is a sincere story about two funny guys confronting a serious disease.
Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Seattle twenty-something with a job, a house, and pretty serious girlfriend named Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard). He works at a public radio station with his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), a boisterous ball-buster who is, well, just like every Seth Rogen character. When Adam goes to a doctor complaining of back pain, he is informed (with truly awful bedside manner) that he has a massive tumor on his spine. He is forced to go to WebMD, where he finds out his expected survival rate is 50 percent.
He tells Rachael; she wants to take care of him. He tells his mom (Anjelica Huston); she wants to take care of him, too. He tells Kyle; he nervously musters a few jokes to lighten the mood. The viewer soon suspects that his mother might be too overbearing a caretaker, and that his increasingly distant girlfriend poses the exact opposite problem.
Kyle, for his part, sticks by his friend and delivers near-constant laughs when he’s on screen, which is therapeutic for both Adam and the audience. But his joking around belies the fact that he too has no idea how to cope with his friend’s disease. On the night before a major surgery, he should be comforting Adam but gets drunk instead—he might be the more terrified of the two.
Aside from Kyle, Adam’s most important sources of support come from inside the hospital. There’s Katie (Anna Kendrick), a 24-year-old hospital-appointed therapist-in-training who looks more like the girls Adam and Kyle pick up at clubs than a doctor. Kendrick is very good at playing the role of the overwhelmed young professional, as she did in Up in the Air, but she doesn’t display much range here, even as her relationship with Adam evolves beyond a strict doctor-patient one.
Adam also befriends two older cancer patients, who introduce themselves by name and cancer type. “Alan, stage three melanoma,” offers Adam a weed-laced macaroon and a good laugh, distracting him from the dread of his first chemo treatment. This sets up a discomfiting scene where Adam wanders through the hospital corridors as high as a kite and pumped full of chemicals, giggling at children’s murals and morgue-bound gurneys alike.
Tough scenes like that make it hard to imagine 50/50 succeeding without the nuanced performance of Gordon-Levitt. Alongside Rogen, he proves adept at the improvisational comedy that his co-star is known for. At the other end of the spectrum, he convincingly acts out some truly stirring moments of despair. He singularly carries the movie, and deserves much of the credit for its impressive emotional balance.
50/50 is loosely based on the true story of writer Will Reiser’s bout with cancer alongside real-life buddy and co-producer Rogen. One way Reiser and his friends dealt with his cancer was by joking about it, and saying they’d make it into a comedy someday. If the humor in the film seems too Apatowian or the tone too unsentimental, it’s because that’s how one 24-year-old comedy writer was most comfortable dealing with cancer.
As its title suggests, 50/50 strikes a careful balance between the tragic and the comedic. The transitions between the two are abrupt and frequent, and while it’s a short movie, it’s a fairly exhausting roller coaster. Viewed simply as a buddy comedy, 50/50 is a success. But that it is able to address a deeper issue in a moving way without compromising on laughs is its most impressive achievement.
