50/50 - A Movie Review -
Will Reiser's first script based loosely on himself and his battle with a rare spinal cancer is tone perfect and wonderfully drawn. His buddy Seth Rogen even helped him write it and played the immature buffoon pothead friend based on him. An interview quotes the friends (which include Evan Goldberg) as "They wanted to make a movie where the audience does not cry all the way through and the person doesn’t die at the end."
There are three majorly good things about 50/50, a small indie film about an unlikely topic -- being the young co-dependent cool dude with cancer:
There are three majorly good things about 50/50, a small indie film about an unlikely topic -- being the young co-dependent cool dude with cancer:
- The performances! Joseph Gordon-Levitt needs to win an Academy Award soon, he's so awesome and grounded in whatever he does. In this he underplays (we're told by people who know that he doesn't do an impression of Will Reiser exactly, but he gets the emotions note-perfect) and does soooo much communication with subtle facial clues. Seth is obviously a "more asshole version of myself" (his words) and keeps it low key but still funny while leaking emotion though the character is trying to act all chill. Bryce Dallas Howard is the (unlikely) hot girlfriend who shows human-level pain and confusion even as she's being an awful bitch. Angelica Huston is an awesome, awful mom in her few scenes. And Anna Kendrick is adorable as a fledgling counselor.
- The emotions! You get caught up in the emotions and understand where everyone is coming from, even the jerk behaviors. And you do cry. It's mostly cool guys being cool, but the emotion is so natural that probably everyone will cry some, laugh a lot. Much of that goes to the performances. The way that Gordon-Levitt underplays the main role means that you the audience fill in so much emotion for him, for instance. But there are also camera effects that work as good metaphors. Good segues from one scene to another to show time passing. The way that potentially heavy emotion scenes have another emotional tone slicing through them to to make the drama feel more realistic. One big thing: if Adam (the Will character) was too saintly, we would not feel he was very realistic. In this story, his dysfunction is cleaned up some from real life (again, reading interviews how he was much more neurotically worried about everything all the time -- which cleared up once he'd come through cancer), but early on he's annoyed by Seth's character at work and Gordon-Levitt does a GREAT Seth Rogen imitation! And this after they've made it clear they've been best friends since grade school and Seth drives him to/from work most days.
- They get the female roles right too. Dudes writing about themselves often get 2D on the female roles. They're only screechy or only sexy or only bookish nerds. The actresses had good dialog with lots of potential. I read that one key line of dialog the therapist says was the result of Seth returning the scene to Will again and again until it sounded real. It's a great line, resonant with lots of family dynamics, that really helps give depth and insight to the story. But I was also thinking: "Will Reiser was able to write THAT?"