3 Things I Hate About this Movie (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (22 November 2011)

I thought this movie was pretty good; I laughed, I (didn't cry, but thought about crying), for the most part it handled its topic realistically and maturely.
BUT there were three things I didn't like in this film:
1. The main character's dad having Alzheimer's. Great idea, and an opportunity for comparing and contrasting ailments, but it's totally undeveloped in the story and leads nowhere and is just distracting.
2. The girlfriend. She's first handled realistically, then out of nowhere becomes a huge jerk. It's okay that she's a jerk, and it's okay that she doesn't want to go to treatments with the main character: she's only human. But then she goes from a round to flat character and the butt of jokes. She wasn't given any room to develop: she became something to move the plot along, and nothing more.
3. The ending. No, I'm not going to complain there's a happy ending: I'm very glad there's a happy ending, that's fine. But tagging on a "love story" makes the whole cancer seem like a quest-narrative, a journey that our hero must triumph over to reach his one-true-love. In essence, it's equating cancer as a "character building" experience, and the hero has won his prize in a girl.
That's a little simplifying. I've never had cancer but people in my family have and some have died and from what I can see cancer sucks. It ruins your life and everybody around you, it's slow, it's painful, it's a horrible way to die. It's not something you laugh off. It changes you. It's not something you go through and then at the end you wipe your brow and say "Whew! Glad that's over!" You worry it will come back. You've been through this painful experience that wasn't caused by anything you did, that you didn't ask for. It just happened to you, and it changes you.
I'm not saying I'm not glad the main character is happy and alive at the end, I'm just saying it's a little Hollywood magic that he ends up with his shrink (the only person that truly understands him?) after going through this traumatic event. It equates being in a relationship as the prize won for "winning" the game of cancer. There's no winners of cancer, only survivors. Validating cancer as an enriching experience and manufacturing a reward for winning it is what makes this otherwise vibrant movie both stale and oddly preachy.