Jeremy’s Tophunder №28: 50/50

8 min readMay 24, 2020

Some forms of crying are graceful and dignified. There’s the crying you do at weddings, or when your best friend has a baby, or when you’re watching the Olympics and an underdog wins in dramatic fashion. Sometimes, you just can’t help but be moved to tears, and even as you feel yourself getting a little dusty, you think to yourself, “sure, it’s okay that this is happening, I still look good doing it.”

And then there’s ugly crying.

This is the crying you do when a loved one dies. The crying you do after drinking too much too soon after your heart was broken. It’s the type of crying where you lose all control of the muscles in your face and you start making sounds reminiscent of a wounded Clydesdale.

Plenty of movies have made me cry.

50/50 makes me ugly cry.

If you haven’t seen it, the gist is that Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a late-20s dude who is diagnosed with spinal cancer. They name the type of cancer in the movie, but I’m not even going to try to replicate it. Just take out some 20 or 30 Scrabble tiles and arrange them randomly and you’re probably closer to the actual name than I would have gotten. The point is, the projected survival rate is around 50 percent (hence the name of the movie). Seth Rogen, (his best friend), Anna Kendrick (his rookie therapist), Bryce Dallas Howard (his girlfriend), and Anjelica Huston (his mother) all pitch in to varying degrees to help him along his path. Cue tear ducts.

Really, it’s not a movie that I see as a monolithic piece of art or entertainment, which is unusual for me. For the most part, a movie is a movie is a movie. In some infrequent instances, I’ll see a singular performance in a movie as starkly separate from the movie itself, almost to the point where the performance means more than the movie does (here, I’m thinking of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, or Jamie Foxx in Ray, for example). But 50/50 isn’t a movie driven by an individual performance. It’s a movie driven by individual moments. I don’t see 50/50 as a series of brush strokes that make up one painting, at least not for most of the movie. It’s a sequence of discrete moments in time, each one representing something entirely different. But it’s in that difference that lies the weight.

50/50 is a movie that takes you. More than that, it takes you to a place that you don’t really want to go. But it’s not exactly holding your hand on the way there. If anything, it drags you.

It presents itself as a quirky, off-beat comedy. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (we’ll call him JGL from here on out for ease’s sake) is a decent straight-man, Seth Rogen was (and is) obviously very accomplished as a comedic actor, and the first half-hour of the movie has some legitimate laughs, and several other scenes that mirror the familiar beats of a comedic movie, even while JGL is actively being told that he has cancer. My favorite example of this is the scene where JGL meets two older cancer patients, scarfs down a couple of weed-laced macaroons, and then ambles through the hospital, stoned out of his goddamn mind. It’s a truly funny scene, and the music (To Love Somebody, by The Bee Gees), manages to sell the comedy while also maintaining some level of dramatic weight. It’s a brilliant scene.

Not long after is a scene in a book store, where Seth Rogen’s character decides to use JGL’s cancer to his advantage, gaining some sympathy with the cute blonde book store employee by telling her that his friend has “Type 4 Back Cancer.” It’s my biggest laugh of the movie, watching Rogen so earnestly identify his friend’s disease so incorrectly, all in the effort to meet a girl. It’s a moment.

The movie is moments. Around the mid-point, you start to have a bit of trouble figuring out where JGL stands from a physical standpoint. Emotionally, he’s not great — he breaks up with his girlfriend, he seems to be annoyed with Seth Rogen and his mom, and therapy isn’t going all that great. But how is -he- doing? Then you start to notice that he’s being filmed differently. It starts when we learn that one of his fellow cancer patient friends died unexpectedly, and the camera pans to a now-empty chair. The next handful of shots show JGL rather obscured — shots over the shoulder of other characters, in partial focus through tree branches, through a fog of weed smoke. The message is clear; our main character’s health is deteriorating. The very next scene is him in therapy with Anna Kendrick, and it opens with him saying, “I’m starting to realize that I’m probably going to die.”

This is the point where the movie starts to grab you.

A few days ago, I mentioned that Up in the Air was my favorite Anna Kendrick performance. I’d like to retract that statement, and also apologize to Kendrick for forgetting how amazing she is in 50/50. Her character is so engagingly unsure of herself, so utterly unprepared for a patient with late-stage cancer, yet somehow exactly the person he needs in his life to make it through the process of dealing with his diagnosis.

I would also say that 50/50 is Seth Rogen’s best acting performance. It’s not his funniest, or even in the top four or five (№1 goes to The Interview and I will fight anyone who argues with this point), but it’s the movie where he most genuinely blends being funny and being a real person with a best friend. If Rogen’s career ever takes a shift towards more serious work the way it did for Steve Carell or Jim Carrey or Bill Murray or Robin Williams (look, I’m saying if, not when), then I’d say 50/50 will be remembered as the first glance in that direction.

The last half-hour of the movie (give or take) is a series of body blows. You think you know what the movie is about as JGL is diagnosed with cancer and goes through chemotherapy. You think the conflict of the movie is that cancer sucks and he breaks up with his girlfriend and life is hard for a little bit but eventually everything works out and there’s no need to worry. Then there are a few scenes back-to-back-to-back that make you realize, “wait, shit, he actually might die.”

Going into the movie, in a weird twist of misinformation, I thought JGL’s character died in the end. The first time I saw it, I was under the impression that Seth Rogen had written the movie with his best friend and writing partner Evan Goldberg, about a friend of theirs that had died of cancer in his 20s. As the movie takes a sharp turn towards a darker and more depressing tone, I remember thinking to myself that I was in no way prepared for JGL’s character to not come out on the other side of the risky surgery that serves as the movie’s climax. As it turns out, Rogen and Goldberg didn’t write the movie, they just produced it from a script written by Will Reiser, their friend who had survived cancer.

So as I re-watch the movie now, does the knowledge that JGL’s character doesn’t die in the end make the experience substantially different? Actually, no. This movie still digs its hooks in and yanks me into the dirt. I really can’t stress this enough — watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt (yeah, that’s right, I’m going back to full names so you know it’s serious) say what might be goodbye to his best friend and his mother are heart-wrenching scenes. I can feel my own breath catching in my chest and regardless of how many times I’ve seen the movie and how sure I am that everything will turn out fine, I, quite simply, fucking lose it.

This is -not- an easy movie to watch.

I’ve seen 50/50 probably 15 or 20 times. You might wonder why I watch it so often when it does this to me every time.

Maybe I’m unusual, but sometimes I really, really enjoy a cathartic cry. I enjoy the process of dredging up all of the unresolved sadness and wounds in my psyche and just letting everything hang outside of my body for a second before re-gathering myself. It’s something I actively try to do a few times each year. Kind of like going to the dentist, but actually doing it. When I’m in that kind of mood, nothing quite gets there the way that 50/50 does.

If there’s any part of the movie that bothers me, it’s that JGL and Anna Kendrick end up kinda-sorta romantically involved. As someone who places a rather high value on mental health maintenance and therapy (I’ve participated in talk therapy for multiple spells throughout my life, and I’m studying to achieve my Masters degree in Mental Health Counseling), it kind of rubs me the wrong way that a therapist-patient relationship would develop into a romantic one. It feels wrong to me. Different people in the field will have different takes on the degree to which this is unethical, but the common idea is that it’s not okay. That being said, it does happen. So the question becomes — how much do I care that the movie chose to go in this direction?

Honestly, I’m not sure that I do. First of all, there’s the classic “it’s just a movie and we want a nice ending” argument, which is (a) unsatisfying, but (b) perfectly valid. Beyond that, though, I think the movie earned it, with the amazing amount of finesse that they were able to apply to the comedy/tragedy border over the first 90 minutes of the movie. Maybe it feels a little forced, but after the emotional lurches that you just barely survive over the preceding 10–15 minutes, you almost don’t care how the movie ends, as long as someone is smiling.

And the last scene actually feels good, all things considered. I really, really like the scene. Kendrick is great, JGL is great, Rogen is great, and the music is great. It caps the movie with a feeling that you just don’t get for the first 90 minutes. Hope.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall