a genuine surprise

Rating: 10/10 (18 October 2011)

FAR exceeded expectations. May even be one of my favorite films of the year - combines some of the comedy one might expect from the Rogen/Goldberg camp, but with really surprisingly strong drama that is carried a lot by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of the most reliably strong actors of his age (which is pretty close to mine). Jonathan Levine takes a very personal story by Will Reiser, who had his own cancer story, and doesn't do too much to make it overtly funny or melodramatic.
Like his previous film The Wackness, he knows when to add a little style (when Adam takes his first weed in a while at the hospital, the world around him is in a fog, but he's so glad to be alive even when he sees a dead body go by he laughs), and then he knows when to just let the actors take the scenes where they need to go. Everyone feels like real people, which seems to be a rare commodity coming out of Hollywood, though a strength is that it doesn't feel like it's been touched by a lot of hands or committees.
In fact, this is the movie I was hoping for out of Funny People, the Apatow film from a couple of years ago which also had Rogen as the buddy of a guy suffering from a possibly deathly ailment and going through some serious existential business. Here the stakes are really felt since the lead guy, and most around him save for one big exception are good people who want to do right and sometimes just find it so hard (Bryce Dallas Howard's cheating girlfriend, who still feels human even as the closest thing to this film's antagonist).
In short - a film that's funny when it wants to be (and is), and is genuinely sad and heartfelt when it must be, with especially Levitt and Huston pulling their weight as top tier talent (though Rogen and Kendrick do their fare share too). 50/50 is that little dramedy which could really make an impact on the people who won't feel shy or turn away from what's been advertised solely as a "cancer comedy", which is not entirely accurate.