50 / 50 (2011)
Three hanky weepies aren’t really designed for men, which is why Will Reisner’s semi-autobiographical cancer comedy feels unusual. When Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) encourages him not to worry, but to use his terminal diagnosis as a pick-up line instead. 50/50 takes some time to really dig beneath the surface of its bromance exterior, in part due to an especially uncomfortable turn from Rogen, who seems to have been drafted in wholesale from any number of sub-Apatow movies, his goofy horndog shtick rapidly transforming into misogyny and unfeeling. It’s not helped by the way the film represents its female characters. Bryce Dallas Howard manages to do a lot with very little as Adam’s girlfriend, a character so consistently unsupportive and unsympathetic that she doesn’t even resemble a human being. Meanwhile, Anna Kendrick reprises her brittle comedic turn from Up In The Air as Adam’s therapist/love interest. Kendrick is good value, but too often it feels like she exists as an appendage to Adam’s crisis rather than as a character in her own right. Reisner is also reluctant to engage with the uglier nature of the disease, sidestepping the potential for mordent black comedy in favour of soft rock and lads-on-the-town hi-jinks. Thank heavens, then, for that central performance. JGL is quietly asserting himself as one of the most versatile actors of his generation in films as diverse as his breakout role in Mysterious Skin, (500) Days of Summer, Brick and The Lookout. It’s a performance of quiet interiority that slowly but surely digs underneath the elements of the story that work less well to reveal the fear and uncertainty behind the illness. He’s helped enormously by Angelica Huston who, in a small, flustery role as Adam’s mother is affecting in the film’s most memorable scene, where Adam is waiting to go into the operating theatre. It’s such a well-tuned moment of catharsis that it’s worth suffering through some of the mildly offensive drabness that precedes it. It’s just a shame that JGL’s performance didn’t have a better film to house it in, as, to my mind, it’s one of the year’s best.
