50/50 (2011)

4 months ago

by Elisabeth Geier

This morning, Adam went for his regular run. He took the same route as always, and looked both ways crossing the street. He went home, showered, and got to work on time. This afternoon, Adam is sitting in a doctor’s office, being told that he has a massive, malignant tumor along his spinal cord, and he may or may not die within the year.

“How can I have a tumor?” he asks. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I recycle.” In other words: why me? As if living clean and being a good person should be enough.

Adam rides the bus home from the hospital and silently processes the news. This is a reminder to those of us who have ever silently judged fellow passengers on public transportation: you never know what that twitchy guy across the aisle is going through.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings a brilliant physicality to Adam, conveying everything with a certain slump of the shoulders, a drawing-in of the chest, the way he beats a steering wheel or lets a phone fall from his hand. In the film’s quieter moments, I kept thinking of the actor’s opening monologue when he hosted SNL in 2009. In an homage to Donald O’Connor’s iconic “Make ‘em Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain, Gordon-Levitt sang, dance, and did a flip off of a wall. It was a physically demanding, joyful performance; Gordon-Levitt was so clearly having the time of his life. In 50/50, he’s so clearly sick. I guess my point is: this guy can act. But though he is the obvious star, 50/50 isn’t his movie alone. Adam has a best friend, a girlfriend, a therapist, and a mother, people who must in turn confront the impact his diagnosis has on their own lives.

Let’s deal with the best friend first, because he’s the other face on the movie posters. Kyle (Seth Rogen) is the fun-loving yin to Adam’s straight-laced yang, a guy who loves beer, weed, and women in equal measure, but above all, loves his best friend. In other words, Kyle is Every Seth Rogen Character from Any Movie, Ever. Fine by me. 50/50 was written by Rogen’s friend Will Reiser, and is based on Reiser’s own experience with cancer, and his real-life friendship with Rogen. This must be why the dialogue between Adam and Kyle is so believable: it’s real.

When Adam tells Kyle the bad news, Kyle jumps to a joke.

“Celebrities beat cancer all the time,” he says. “Lance Armstrong’s had it twice.” He lists a few more famous cancer survivors. When he gets to Patrick Swayze, Adam has to remind him: “Dude. That guy is dead.” It’s a reminder to the audience, as well. Oh yeah. Patrick Swayze did die. Cancer is the worst.

This kind of pop-culture shorthand might seem avoidant, but here, the tone is just right. Adam and Kyle don’t gloss over the severity of Adam’s diagnosis, they simply process it the way two pals would. Certain people of a certain generation work through hardship with pop culture references and jokes, because what the hell else are we supposed to do?

I want to get back to Seth Rogen for a minute, because Seth Rogen is my dream date. Wait, I mean, because Seth Rogen is largely responsible for 50/50 being made, and also he has the cutest smile. Seriously: Seth Rogen is pretty great, right? The man is reliable, which I mean as a compliment, though I supposed reliability can be leveraged against an actor, in that “he always plays the same role” kind of way. But in Rogen, reliability is nice. I quite like the character he always plays, and I like that he seems to mature as the actor himself ages. Sure, Kyle is kind of a jackass, but he’s a loyal friend, and he’s there for his buddy when it counts. Rogen excels in buddy films; this is the man who co-wrote Superbad, the great bromantic comedy of our time. In fact, Adam and Kyle from 50/50 could be Seth and Evan from Superbad, all grown up and dealing with life.

I was skeptical at first of the Gordon-Levitt/Rogen pairing. It seems like these two personalities shouldn’t click— Gordon-Levitt is so actor-y, and Seth Rogen is so Seth Rogen-y. But as best friends, they complement each other well. They goof off and make jokes, but get serious when they must, and they have real moments of tenderness and real fights. At one point, Adam mimics Kyle’s laugh, and it’s great because Seth Rogen does have that distinctive laugh, and only a real friend can get away with making fun of somebody for the noise they make when they express joy.

In a later scene, one I imagine was largely improvised on-set, Adam shaves his head with Kyle’s electric trimmer.

“Wait, what do you even use this for,” Adam asks, looking from the trimmer to his friend’s five o’clock shadow and full head of hair.

“I use it to shave my balls,” Kyle says. “Nah, I’m kidding.”

“No, you’re not.”

“No, I’m not.”

They laugh, and Adam’s hair comes off in strips, and their faces waver between amusement and fear as they acknowledge the fucked-up situation they’re in.

Adam also has a mother, portrayed by Anjelica Houston. He tries the pop culture angle on her at first, too, asking over pizza, “Have you ever seen Terms of Endearment?” Finally he comes clean and tells her about the tumor, and she jumps up mid-dinner to make him some green tea, because she heard it can prevent cancer.

“But I already have cancer,” Adam tells her.

“Just let me do something,” she says.

It’s a triumph of the film that Adam and his mother talk about their feelings without talking about their feelings the way some “cancer movies” might have them do. Adam is allowed to get annoyed with his mom, to roll his eyes and screen her calls, and also to ask her to hold him when he’s most afraid.

The other women in 50/50 are Adam’s girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) and therapist (Anna Kendrick). The girlfriend isn’t ready to deal with terminal disease; the therapist is fresh out of grad school and has trouble maintaining boundaries. Howard and Kendrick are both good, and the romantic subplot in the film is sweet enough, but it’s the central long-term relationships — those between Adam and Kyle, and Adam and his mother — that carry the most weight.

Is it cloying to call a movie “brave,” especially one about cancer? Because that’s what I keep thinking when I think back on this film, on how it quietly confronts stereotypes and lets characters be human, with all the messiness that entails. It lets the guy with cancer be kind of a jerk sometimes. It lets his loved ones freak out and say the wrong thing. It lets people be complex and flawed, the way people are complex and flawed in real life, but sometimes movies about disease don’t reveal. What 50/50 does better than any movie I can recall is showcase how a serious illness can be both life-altering and mundane. After all, there’s nothing unusual about suffering. This is an experience so universal, it feels silly to point out; to live is to suffer, some philosopher probably said.

But on a personal level, the specifics are all that counts, and the specifics are what 50/50 gets exactly right. The way Adam and Kyle talk about girls. The way Adam’s mom positions herself on a couch. The way Adam argues with his therapist and himself. By the time Adam’s friends and family come together in a waiting room towards the end of the film, we care a great deal about what happens to them all. Not because Adam is more likable than any other cancer patient, or his loved ones any more deserving of sympathy, but because these are complex human beings dealing with something intensely personal, and intensely relatable.