Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam Lerner, a 27-year-old public radio journalist in Seattle who finds out he has a cancerous tumor in his spine. The title of 50/50 is the survival rate he reads on the internet. That is the whole premise, and Jonathan Levine’s film does not dress it up. It walks Adam through chemotherapy, a girlfriend who cannot handle it, a therapist who is not trained to, and a best friend who treats the diagnosis as a social asset.
Trailer, via The Dollar Theater.
Adam Lerner Gets the News
Will Reiser wrote the screenplay, and the film is loosely inspired by his own experience with cancer. Gordon-Levitt’s Adam is based on Reiser. That origin shows in the small things: the way Adam tells his mother, the way he keeps his life moving, the way he turns down help he clearly needs.
The diagnosis is schwannoma neurofibrosarcoma. Adam’s back pain sends him to a doctor, and the answer comes back as a tumor in his spine. He is 27. He is not heroic about it, and the film does not ask him to be.
His mother, Diane, is already nursing her husband Richard, who has Alzheimer’s. Anjelica Huston plays Diane as a woman stretched past her limit who still offers to take her son in. Adam says no. Rachael, his girlfriend, has promised to care for him.
That promise is the engine of the film’s first act, and it is a promise the movie quietly dismantles.
Rachael, Kyle and the Greyhound
Bryce Dallas Howard plays Rachael, an artist. Kyle, played by Seth Rogen, dislikes her from the start. Kyle is Adam’s best friend, loyal and immature in roughly equal measure, and he is right about Rachael in a way that costs him nothing to say out loud.
Rachael is uncomfortable with Adam’s treatments. She is often late picking him up. She gives him a retired racing greyhound named Skeletor as a pet, which is the kind of gift that looks like generosity and functions as distance.
Kyle sees Rachael kissing another man at a gallery. He forces her to confess the infidelity to Adam. Adam breaks up with her. Then Kyle takes him to a bar, and the two of them use Adam’s illness to pick up two women.
That sequence is the film’s clearest statement about Kyle: he is a bad influence and a real friend at the same time, and 50/50 refuses to pick one. Rogen plays him without apology, and the screenplay hands him the film’s loosest, funniest material.
Katherine McKay and the Bad Therapy
Anna Kendrick plays Katherine McKay, a Ph.D. candidate doing the clinical portion of her thesis at the hospital. She is Adam’s therapist. She is young, inexperienced and visibly out of her depth.
Their early sessions are uneven. Adam does not open up. Katherine does not know how to make him. The film lets that be awkward rather than charming, which is the right call.
After a chemo session, Katherine drives Adam home. They develop a rapport that blurs the professional and the personal. She is the one who helps him understand his mother’s situation, that loved ones carry their own weight.
This is where 50/50 earns its keep. The therapist is not a device for a montage. She is a person with a thesis to finish and a patient she is not supposed to want to save.
Mitch, Alan and the Macaroons
At treatment, Adam meets Mitch and Alan, two older cancer patients also on chemo. Matt Frewer plays Mitch. Philip Baker Hall plays Alan. They bond over cannabis-laced macaroons.
The older patients are the film’s quiet correction to Adam’s self-pity. They have been doing this longer. They are not inspirational. They are funny and tired and they know the drill.
Alan and Mitch give the film a sense of time passing that the plot otherwise rushes. Chemo is boring. Waiting is boring. The film is honest about that in a way few cancer movies are.
What 50/50 Actually Gets Right
The film runs 100 minutes. It was shot from February to March 2010 and released on September 30, 2011. It grossed $41 million. At the Golden Globes it was nominated for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy and for Best Actor for Gordon-Levitt.
The tagline is “It takes a pair to beat the odds.” That is a bad tagline for a film this restrained, and it sells the wrong movie. 50/50 is not a triumph-over-adversity picture. It is a picture about a man who is not sure he is going to make it and who keeps showing up anyway.
Here is the running order of Adam’s arc, as the film lays it out:
| Beat | What happens |
|---|---|
| Diagnosis | Back pain leads to a spinal tumor |
| Research | Adam finds the 50/50 survival rate online |
| Treatment | Chemotherapy begins; he meets Mitch and Alan |
| Relationship | Rachael promises care, then cheats |
| Breakup | Kyle forces the confession; Adam ends it |
| Therapy | Katherine McKay, uneven sessions, growing rapport |
| Support | Diane offers care; Adam declines |
The film’s real subject is not survival. It is the people around the patient, and how badly most of them handle it. Rachael handles it badly. Kyle handles it badly in a different way. Diane handles it well and is not thanked for it. Katherine handles it badly because she is not trained to handle it at all.
Gordon-Levitt carries the middle of the film without a single scene that begs for sympathy. That is harder than it sounds. The role could have been a showcase. He plays it as a man trying to keep his life normal while his life is not normal.
The screenplay by Reiser is the reason this works. It is based on something real and it does not inflate that. The jokes land because the film does not use them to escape the subject. Kyle using Adam’s cancer to pick up women is a joke and a character note and a small cruelty, all in one scene.
This paper’s read: 50/50 is a good film with a great performance at its center and a script that knows when to shut up. That verdict is ours, not the source’s. The survival rate is the hook. The friendships are the movie.
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