Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been impressive before, in films such as “Mysterious Skin” and “500 Days of Summer”, and yet I felt he was very bland as the cancer-stricken young man at the center of “50/50”. Perhaps that blandness made him easier for the audience to identify with, but I wanted there to be more of a core to the character than just the wide brushstrokes laid out by the screenwriter.
He plays 27 year old Adam, an earnest well-meaning young man who works for Public Radio in northern California. Adam exercise, recycles, doesn’t smoke or drink, puts up with insufferable girlfriend Rachael, exasperating best friend Kyle, his controlling mother, and if all that isn’t enough, ends up diagnosed with a malignancy on his spine.
The film follows Adam’s life as the disease progresses, and how it affects all the relationships in his life. Rachael , played by Bryce Dallas Howard (giving her second bad performance of last year, following her work as the nadir of the ensemble of “The Help”), pledges her support to Adam, even as she is cheating on him behind his back.
Kyle, played with gleeful raunchiness by Seth Rogen, is Adam’s co-worker and best friend, whose idea of support seems to be using Adam’s diagnosis as a way for the pair to hook up with girls. Kyle has his own issues, and watching him grow as a truly supportive friend, helping his buddy through the roughest bouts of the illness is a pleasure, and gives Rogen an opportunity to do more than just spout off-color jokes or dirty dialogue. The film takes the time to develop how a terminal illness affects the people around the patient as well as the patient himself, and it is this branching out of the screenplay that adds much to the piece as a whole.
Anjelica Huston plays Diane, Adam’s mother, in only a few scenes, but makes a good impression as the controlling mother who must deal with something in her son’s life that she cannot control. In addition to Adam’s illness, she is also caring for her husband who’s battling Alzheimer’s Disease, and Diane’s stressed, brittle nature suits the situation that particular character is dealing with. Not so with the performance of Gordon-Levitt; although he portrays the shocked, numbing aspect of dealing with illness well, his later on explosion of anger and fear doesn’t come off well. It just looks like bad acting, something that I don’t usually associate with this performer. Veteran character actor Phillip Baker Hall also provides some weight and texture to the film as a fellow chemo patient who introduces Adam to the pleasure of medicinal marijuana.
The strongest performance in the film for me was that of Anna Kendrick as Katherine, the in-training therapist who is still feeling her way into uncomfortable territory (Adam is only her third patient), and the friendship that develops between the two seems completely natural and unforced. Kendrick is a gifted actress, who truly deserved her 2009 Oscar nomination for “Up in the Air”, and I would probably have nominated her again for her performance here.
There are some strengths to “50/50”, among them the several of the performances and especially the screenplay, which doesn’t drift off into familiar “sickness” movie clichés, but rather explores the situation with a mixture of sensitivity and bawdy humor that strikes a pretty successful tone. And the truth is that despite the serious subject matter, there is a lot of humor in this film. For whatever reason though, that central performance just felt “off” to me, and left the film feeling overall a bit emptier than it should’ve been.
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