50-50 - Seth Rogen in good film shock

Any film that is advertised with the phrase "starring Seth Rogen" immediately puts my guard up. This is a man who has managed to carve himself out a flourishing career as what I can only describe as a sort of real life Peter Griffin - the lovable douchebag friend of a friend who says the wrong things at the wrong times and is effortlessly funny and irritating in equal measures. Looking over Rogan's filmography you can hopefully agree that I'm right to be wary. He has been in an extraordinary long list of epicly shit films, with the occasional classic. He played the voice of the alien in "Paul", and was fantastically cast in that well-written role. Perhaps Rogen's problem lies in the fact that he's so easily cast as the lovable stoner, that once on set a director doesn't feel the need to direct him to do anything different to his usual routine. Rogen is a funny guy, so with a decent script and a bit of control he should be a great comedy actor.

"50-50" is a film that lends plenty of evidence towards this theory. It's a film in which Rogen is used sparingly, and as such is hilarious at every turn. Rogen stars alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Adam, a man who is diagnosed with cancer and given a 50-50 chance to live. Rogen is Kyle, his best friend and confidant who's light-hearted banter contrast against society's expectations of who we should behave around someone with cancer. As Adam struggles to work out the best way to break the news to his mother, Kyle is busy convincing Adam that his cancer is a massive chick-magnet. Tacky though this may sound initially, I found the film to be a touching look at dealing with tragedy. No-one is ever prepared for the day that someone they know and love dies, or is given a 50-50 death sentence, so why should we be surprised that people often deal with it in shockingly different ways. Adam reacts by becoming insular, rejecting his mother's attention and the help of his psychologist, instead finding Kyle's light-heartedness comforting. Eventually though, he turns on Kyle too, accusing him of not taking his condition seriously.

"50-50" contains a fantastic performance from Anna Kendrick as Adam's psychologist. She has only just qualified in her role and Adam is one of her first patients. She spends half her time trying to connect emotionally to Adam, and the other half of her time worrying that she isn't being detached enough to be professional. It's a character that could easily have become a tedious romantic side interest, but Kendrick is extremely good at playing up the helpless confusion her character feels, the same confusion that we all feel when called upon to deal with death.

I'm not going to lie, 50-50 is a tear-jerker. I can imagine that it'll be an emotional shuttle mission for anyone who has lived with cancer or had a friend / relative who has done the same. Not only is it a tear-jerker though, it is a film that treats its subject carefully and realistically - something that I think is extremely hard to do.

The next paragraph is going to contain gigantic spoilers for the ending of the film, but it's an important point that I want to address. So if you really don't want to know what happens at the end, stop reading the review here...


SPOILERS BELOW!





50-50 has a Happy Ending. In the end Adam has his surgery and is told that with time he will make a full recovery from his cancer - a Happy Ending. Happy endings are an interesting beast that can create all sorts of responses from people watching. Sometimes people are happy to laugh and cheer, at other times people see nothing more than a sleazy corporate decision to leave the door open to a sequel. For me, a happy ending has to be earned, or has to make sense in the context of the story being told. A happy ending that's bolted on to the end of a story because the writers are either a) leaving the door open for part 2 or b) frightened to follow through on the story they created is something that's sad and open to derision.

For me, earning a happy ending is primarily about doing something interesting with your storyline. The characters in your story should have some sort of arc, go on a journey that starts in one place, goes up and down and ends up somewhere new. The journey can be an emotional one or a journey of discovery, in which something is learnt or a pain is endured. One of the best earned happy endings I've seen in recent times was the Christmas specials that followed the end of the second series of The Office. As I'm sure you'll know, The Office followed the tribulations of the hopelessly self-promoting David Brent as he bumbled his way through his role as a middle manager in a paper merchants in Slough. Brent is a legendary comic creation who is smug, selfish, intolerant and bigoted - but all he really wanted to do was make people laugh, he just happened to be really bad at it. However in the the Christmas specials of 2004 the series ended with a simple yet powerful series of happy twists, the best being the final scene in which David Brent told a shit gag - and everyone laughs. By putting Brent's character under a critical microscope for 2 series, he was been subjected to so much pain and scrutiny that he finally deserved a happy ending. To give him anything else would almost be ungrateful.

The same is true of Chanel 4's stand-out sitcom from 1999 - Spaced. The happy ending is earned by the characters in it slugging through an emotional mire, but digging themselves out with grit and determination.

Thus "50-50" earns its happy ending by wringing Adam's emotions out to dry, by treating its subject matter with the due care and attention it is able to reward its audience for allowing themselves to go through the emotional grinder in the name of entertainment. I don't think "50-50" would have necessarily been either a worse or a better film had Adam died at the end, but his survival cannot be called out as a mawkish appeal to base sentimentality - rather it is earned and deserved.