50/50 (2011)

Directed by: Jonathan Levine

My whiskers start twitching when I hear a movie is “inspired by a true story” since it so often means a moralising slice of selective observations about idealised people.  Thus it was a surprise to find that 50/50, based loosely on the experiences of writer Will Reiser and his real-life friend Seth Rogen (who co-stars), is an almost unalloyed pleasure.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) leads a healthy, borderline-ascetic existence, in contrast to his buddy Kyle (Rogen) a semi-slob hedonist who works at the same radio station in Seattle.  So when he is told by his doctor he has a rare and dangerous spinal tumour (survival odds 50:50) Adam can scarcely believe the news.  Initially blanking his smothering mom Diane (Anjelica Huston) and dementia-afflicted dad Richard (Serge Houde) he turns to needy girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) who seems able to go only so far in being supportive, and to Kyle, who veers between over-wrought, premature grief (organising a celebration of Adam’s life to which Adam is invited) and opportunistic exploitation of people’s sympathy for Adam’s condition to pull women.

His physician has little in the way of a bedside manner, and so Adam is directed to not-quite qualified psychiatrist Kate (Anna Kendrick) who is somewhat out of her depth in getting the buttoned-down Adam to express his feelings. These emotions start to simmer when Rachael is found to have been cheating on him, and reach a cathartic boiling point the night before he undergoes life-or-death surgery.

In some ways, this is a conventional romantic comedy-drama, with a will-he-survive-and-get-the-right-girl theme running throughout.  Cancer has been a taboo (at least in the context of rom-com) for a long time, but 50/50 makes it no more complex than, say, a road accident.

That’s not a criticism – anything that makes it possible to address important-but-forbidden subjects is probably a good thing, provided the topic is not trivialised and, thankfully, I don’t feel Levine and Reiser fall into that trap.  The movie does not so much tread a fine line between sentimentality and gross-out humour as hop between the two, but never excessively.  If anything, it’s a little too neat: characters are divided between major ones (Adam, Kyle, Kate, Diane) who have perfect character-arcs, and minor ones (Rachael, physician, surgeon, co-patients Alan and Mitch) who have none at all, and the ending will not challenge anyone raised on Hollywood movies, though it’s understandable given that it’s based on the experiences of a man who went on to be the movie’s writer.