Great

Rating: 8/10 (18 May 2012)

Adam Lerner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the hero of Levine's new film, is dealing with a situation that's even more wack: At age 27, he's been diagnosed with an unpronounceable form of spinal cancer that gives him only a 50 percent chance of survival.Why doesn't he have a license? Is he fearful, or just broke?) Adam's hospital visits introduce him to a few sympathetic souls: There's Alan (Philip Baker Hall), a cancer patient in his 70s who generously shares his medical-marijuana-laced macaroons; and Katherine (Anna Kendrick), a nervous young psychology student who offers Adam therapy sessions as part of her thesis project.Levine and the scriptwriter, Will Reiser (who based the story in part on his own experience as a cancer patient), labor mightily to find both the drama and the comedy in Adam's awful plight, with a success rate that's slightly greater than the ratio of the film's title. Scene by scene, 50/50 can be both amusing and moving, with the tightly wound Gordon- Levitt and the boundaryless Rogen forming an oddly complementary pair. But as a whole the movie never quite coheres, seeming to skitter away at the last minute from both full-body laughter and full-body sobs. "Did you see Terms of Endearment?" Adam asks his mother moments before he tells her he has cancer. The line gets a laugh because, presumably, of the distance between that movie's Hollywood vision of a family brought closer by cancer and this movie's rawer, realer version. But the sprawling, occasionally operatic Terms of Endearment felt more honest than this cautious and tidy film.