DVD Review

Title: 50/50

Director: Jonathan Levine

Actors: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogan, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston

Run time: 100 Minutes

Release Date: Jan 24 2012

Reviewed By Tessa Perkins

When you first hear about this film, you might think: how can a story about a young guy with cancer be a comedy? Somehow this film manages to find humour in such a tragic subject, and with great performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogan we see how getting cancer turns the life around of Gordon-Levitt's character. After being diagnosed with spinal cancer, he finds out that he has a 50/50 chance of survival and the people in his life deal with this in various ways.

The first thing I noticed about this film was its obvious use of Vancouver to represent Seattle. The first scene has Adam (Gordon-Levitt) running along the seawall in Stanley Park, one scene has the VFS (Vancouver Film School) logo on a building in the background, and one of the deleted scenes has Adam crossing the street at Main and Kingsway. It was hard for me to suspend disbelief and accept that they were in Seattle when I kept seeing them in Vancouver, but I suppose for people who aren’t familiar with the city that wouldn’t be much of a problem.

Anyway, Adam is only 27, but the therapist (Anna Kendrick) they assign to him is even younger at 24 as she is completing her PhD and in training. Adam is actually her first patient and she tries to figure out how to act around him and practice what she has learned even is he says he feels fine. I really liked her character, and there is a great scene when she gives him a ride home from his chemo treatment and he tells her to pull over. She thinks it is because he needs to vomit, but he has made her pull over next to a dumpster so he can unload the trash covering the floor of her car. It is quite predictable that they end up dating by the end of the film.

Rachel (Bryce Dallas Howard), Adam's girlfriend of a few months when he is diagnosed, decides to stay with him and take care of him. This turns out to be too hard on her and she ends up cheating on him with a guy at one of her gallery opening events. Seth Rogan says his favourite scene is when they destroy one of her paintings in revenge. There is also bonus footage of this in the special features. Rachel is quite a funny character as they made her this strange combination of good intentions that go horribly wrong as if she doesn’t realise what she’s doing. One example of this is her idea to buy Adam a dog, but not just any cute little dog, but a really old retired race dog named Skeletor.

Adam’s best friend Kyle (Rogan) outwardly acts like he’s taking the news quite well and seemingly exploits the fact that Adam has cancer to attract girls, but it becomes evident that he really does care about his friend. I also love the old guys that Adam meets in chemo who give him weed and give him advice about his girl problems. Adam's mother (Anjelica Huston) also adds some laughs to the film as she is extremely overbearing and always thinks the doctors aren’t doing as much as they could.  

This film I both touching and humorous, and I like the way it shows these characters in a realistic way as they struggle to deal with the news. There are many great deleted scenes, one of which is said to be the original ending that they were considering. There is also some great footage of writer Will Reiser discussing the way the story is based on his own experience with having cancer and the way his friends, including Seth Rogan, reacted to it. I really enjoyed the mixture of drama and light hearted humour that made this film poignant and laughable at the same time.

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