50/50 Review

Related Content

• 50/50 USC Event With Seth Rogen Asks the Question: Can Cancer and Humor Co-Exist?
  October 13, 2011
• Fanatics! Henry Rollins' KCRW Show Tomorrow Night: Henry's Live With a Ton of New Records
  May 25, 2012
• Marijuana-Like Compound in Your Brain Could be Magic Pill For Weight Loss: But Don't Reach For The Doritos Just Yet
  March 7, 2012
• Best Above-Average Joe
  September 22, 2011
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt's The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Inception Star's Crowdsourced hitRECord Website Becomes a Book
  November 30, 2011

More About

• 50/50 (Movie)
• Will Reiser
• Seth Rogen
• Movie Stars
• Celebrity News

Like this Story?

Get the Screeners: Screening previews, news, reviews and features on everything from the silver screen.

Make sign up easy with:

One scene captures the tricky tonal balance of cancer comedy 50/50. Adam, the straightedge radio producer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has just finished his first round of chemo. It was tough, but the kindly gents IV'd next to him made it easier by sharing their pot brownies. As the Bee Gees play on the soundtrack, Adam wanders through the oncology ward in a haze and giggles at the sad-looking patients, harried nurses, and shrouded corpses as they float by. It's complicated making a movie like 50/50, which was written by Will Reiser based on his own early-twenties experience with a tumor on his spine. That scene, and the whole film really, intermingles anonymous tragedy with blunt comedy, but uneasily—in a way that suggests that though it's OK to laugh, we shouldn't exactly feel good about it. Although often quite funny, 50/50 is more often angry; indeed, the most welcome transformation Adam makes isn't from sick to well but from milquetoast to asshole. Once a DON'T WALK-obeying welcome mat, Adam dumps his duplicitous girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), pushes away his overbearing mother (Anjelica Huston), and offers his therapist (Anna Kendrick) some bracing sarcasm. The movie's only constant is Adam's good pal Kyle (Reiser's good pal Seth Rogen), who sticks with him through head-shaving, surgery, and despair. He reads cancer books on the john! He is a Good Person! And this is what makes 50/50 not only a cancer movie but also a Seth Rogen movie. Bros before hos before neurofibroma sarcoma schwannomas.