Living with cancer.

Rating: 5/10 (23 November 2011)

When it comes to high-emotion situations in real life, few are more extreme than a diagnosis of cancer. Add in the fact that when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Adam Lerner is only 27 years old when he gets the news and you already have a story primed for melodrama and loaded with tears and cheers. First-time writer Will Reiser uses his own experience with cancer at a young age to play down the dramatic aspects of illness, and instead showcase the lighter side of things, showing that even when you have cancer you still want to get laid and stoned with your best friend. It's not a strict comedy by any means, there are quite a few moments that got me a little choked up, but Reiser clearly set out with a goal to show things a little lighter than cancer is usually treated in the film. For the most part this works and, although at times I felt it was a little too light, I enjoyed Reiser's more authentic portrayal of a diagnosis like this.
The film sets out to be an unconventional cancer movie, and it achieves at that but it's still so much a cancer movie that there isn't any room for anything else. Yes, getting a severe diagnosis like this still leaves room in your life for comedic moments, but it also doesn't control every second of your life. It felt like every frame of this movie was about cancer, and there wasn't any room for just...life. When Adam's best friend is a jerk it's about cancer, when his mom is too worried it's about cancer, when his girlfriend does something awful it's about cancer. Adam learns his diagnosis early on in the film and we're not given enough time to understand the character before this, so the whole thing ends up revolving around the cancer. The whole thing would have benefited so much by getting us to have a stake in him before he gets the news, but instead Reiser builds the entire movie around cancer; which it should be, but not to this extreme.
Reiser focuses everything on the cancer, and as a result there's a lot of stuff that gets left behind, namely the supporting characters. In approaching Adam, they take on the guy full force, helped by a great performance from Gordon-Levitt. I was a huge fan of Gordon-Levitt in the mid-2000s when he had this incredible streak of solid performances, but then he kind of faded for me and I was worried that I wasn't going to be impressed by him again. Thankfully I found this to be a return to form for him, taking on a character who shuts himself off and meets people's desire to help with aggression but quickly making him likable and easy to root for. As I said earlier, I wish we had met Adam earlier so I could have had more of a stake in him, but Levitt makes up for it with a very sympathetic performance that taps into the root of what it's like to have something like this take you over so young.
It's when we get to the rest of the characters that I think Reiser slips up. For the most part, all of the supporting characters are so thin that it's hard to really appreciate any of them as real people. Reiser works so hard on making the cancer aspect feel more genuine and unique that he doesn't spend enough time with the characters to make them feel as such. They all just feel like these movie types we've already seen instead of real people, the most offensive of which being Adam's therapist played by Anna Kendrick. Buying Kendrick as a therapist is hard enough to get over, but the way that they treat this relationship is honestly one of the most offensive and ridiculous things I've seen all year. From the second they meet it's such a Hollywood display of incorrect cutesiness in a film that, for the most part, was dealing with things in a pretty realistic way that it was honestly jaw-dropping to this absurd relationship develop. Kendrick and Levitt try their best to make up for it, they do have a very sweet chemistry between them, but for me there was no getting around how absolutely ridiculous this whole relationship was. It dragged the film down a lot for me.
For a while the title of the film was going to be Living With Cancer, and I feel like that would have been a more accurate name for it. Reiser should be admired for his approach to dealing with cancer, especially at such a young age, but I wish he had spent a lot more time on the actual living side of things. There are a lot of genuine emotions going on here and I appreciate Reiser and director Jonathan Levine not going the easy route with melodrama and emotional manipulation that you find in most stories dealing with this topic, but the film has quite a few contrivances that betray the characters in order to benefit story progression and the therapist relationship is something that left a bad taste in my mouth all the way through. There's still a lot to be admired though, so at the end I've come down pretty much in the middle when it comes to the overall product.