It charges into a devilishly tricky frontier (melding drama with comedy, with a serious subject attached) and comes out virtually scar-less

Rating: 9/10 (12 October 2011)

I had a fair deal of doubts and suspicions walking into "50/50" because I knew that the territory it was delving into is a devilishly tricky and uncertain one: taking a subject as serious and relevant as cancer and using it as the groundwork for a movie that is half-comedy, half-drama. To be honest, a couple of times, it did reaffirm some of my pre-screening doubts. An early-on joke about Patrick Swayze, in particular, I felt crossed the line and sparked a burst of anger in me. However, apart from my few qualms and some uneven twists in the picture, "50/50" turned out to be quite a special little movie. And although it charged into that dangerous, borderline-taboo territory so boldly, it came out on the other side with virtually no scars to speak of.
The movie was meant to be taken as a pure comedy in its opening sequence and it was here that I found my gripes. The way it treats the diagnosis of the main character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the early-on interactions between him and Seth Roger, were playing jokes with the subject of cancer and cancer patients, I felt, a little too brazenly. Virtually all of us have, at some point in our lives, met or known somebody ill with cancer. I am no exception and therefore a couple of the gags made me feel upset as opposed to amused. But that was early on, all contained within the first 30 minutes.
After that point, "50/50" wields its dual-genre identity with astonishing deftness. My apprehensions were crushed as Mr. Rogen, as Mr. Gorden-Levitt's lifelong friend, helped him to try and live a little more before his untimely fate, whatever it may be, should roll around. The squeamish relationship between the protagonist and Bryce Dallas Howard at the beginning later turns out to be squeamish for a reason, as it opens up doors for a far more interesting, if predictable, dynamic. The said dynamic being between Mr. Gordon-Levitt as the cancer patient and an up-and-coming starlet named Anna Kendrick, as his counselor. I'll admit it, the outcome of their dynamic is by no means unexpected; anybody even remotely familiar with romantic comedies can see it coming from the word go. But the sharp writing and the charisma by the two talents involved make up for it and their relationship, I happily confess, is one of the more involving elements of the picture.
The picture's dramatic architecture becomes surprisingly powerful, very close to (what I consider the pinnacle of movies dealing with the subject of cancer and life and death) Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru." But it melds this magnificently with its sense of humor. And it accomplishes this, after the opening third, by making jokes about things that you might otherwise expect to be from a movie devoid of a deadly disease twisting the plot. Mr. Gordon-Levitt and Mr. Rogen make a great comical combination and share a number of humorous moments together, the biggest laugh being one where they take out their anger upon a canvas painted by an ex-girlfriend and then proclaim they ought to hang it back up, now that it's deformed and full of holes. Other great moments center around Matt Frewer and the late Philip Baker Hall as a group of elderly cancer patients, who ease the pain of their disease by cracking some jokes about it. Jokes that you would expect a cancer patient to make. And that is the key to where the movie can pull gags with its sensitive subject and succeed.
"50/50" is not without its faults. Apart from some iffy, insensitive jokes toward the beginning, the movie's photography by Terry Stacey is not Academy Award-worthy. The interiors are too gloomy and the exteriors are so soft it made me wonder if the cameramen ever heard of white balance. Anjelica Huston, as the patient's mother, frets too much before she even has a reason to fret about, and does not, until the very end, fulfill the dynamic the screenwriters obviously intended. It seemed more superficial to me than dramatic. And the pointless sex (oh, the pointless sex scene! How many times have we seen thee!)...well, I think I've repeated my opinion on that more than enough times in recent years. But in the end, the movie does come across with enormous sweeps of dramatic power and bombastic explosions of gut-busting humor, perfectly melding them together so that we laugh when we're meant to laugh and cry when we're meant to cry. As 2011 comes closer to an end, and the credits of "50/50" started to roll, I sat there in the theater thinking to myself: "Maybe this won't have been such a bad year, after all."