Time for an Oscar Do Over

Rating: 9/10 (21 February 2012)

In a just universe, no one would get cancer and 50/50 would have been nominated for at least four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Why does it matter? It doesn't; or at least it shouldn't. But Hollywood owes it to the future of the industry to support slightly daring and off-beat films like 50/50 rather than smugly liberal (and covertly racist) movies like The Help or yet another Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt star vehicle.
For anyone who has had to deal with cancer themselves or in a loved one (and sadly, that probably means most of us), you owe it to yourself to see this wonderful film. When she heard about the subject matter, my wife refused to see it, having just recently lost her sister to the disease. It took me months to persuade her and she is now so taken by it that she's talked about little else since.
I assure you that, despite what you may think, you simply don't know how you're going to react to news like that received by Adam until you actually receive it. Posts on IMDb complain that he didn't cry enough, to which I have just one response: it's a two hour movie that covers a year in his life but the film chooses (very wisely) to focus on the many other ways in which he contended with his diagnosis. That is what makes this film such a joy to watch.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anna Kendrick are so beautifully cast that it is like that were made for these roles. Still in their 20's, at first neither of them - neither the patient nor the "expert" - fathoms that the world can present such difficult challenges. They're young, they have good jobs, they have good friends and are going to live forever, aren't they? Neither one has ever experienced deprivation or hardship.
I think part of the reason why Hollywood has had a hard time with 50/50 is that it doesn't fit neatly into any of the boxes that the industry machine has created. It was marketed badly and inaccurately, largely, one suspects, on the basis of that fact that Seth Rogen is in it (and he's very good, by the way). It deals with a subject that instinctively makes the audience uncomfortable, and it plays on that discomfort in an original way, without ever exploiting it.
An 8.5.