Cancer is no laughing matter, unless of course you’re Seth Rogen, and the way you deal with your best friend getting cancer is to make a comedy film out of the experience.
Actually, to call 50/50 a comedy is to do it a disservice. It is instead a humorous, touching and uplifting drama that is never crass or in bad taste. As Adam, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a true and honest performance as a young man dealing with ideas of mortality long before he should. Gordon-Levitt’s performance is subtle and never attention-grabbing, and yet because of this he is mesmerising. He underplays scenes that in lesser hands could have become mawkish, but in one of the film’s best and most moving scenes, he brilliantly expresses all the grief and anger of his situation.
Much of the laughs come from Seth Rogen playing Adam’s best friend Kyle, who decides to blunder through this ordeal the only way he knows how: by making fun of it, and using Adam’s cancer to get laid. While it sounds crude, it’s really not; Rogen has such a likeable quality that it works, never making you squirm but rather laugh uproariously. The rest of the supporting cast are a joy, from Anna Kendrick’s inexperienced therapist, to Bryce Dallas Howard’s selfish girlfriend, to Anjelica Houston as Adam’s loving, worried mother.
It is a rare film that can have you laughing one minute and then crying the next, mainly because that balance is so difficult to achieve properly. Fortunately, director Jonathan Levine and screenwriter Will Reiser (Adam’s real-life counterpart) know what they’re doing. Truly one of the best films of the year.
