Levine: 50/50 (2011)

Originally titled I’m With Cancer, 50/50 is loosely based on screenwriter Will Reiser’s experience of spinal cancer in his mid-20s. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam Lerner, Reiser’s alter-ego, a Seattle public radio broadcaster who suddenly discovers that he has a rare back tumour requiring immediate chemotherapy. Most of the film follows Adam as he adjusts to his new routine, as well as the way it affects his relationships with his best friend (Seth Rogen), girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), mother (Anjelica Huston) and therapist (Anna Kenrick), along with some of the other patients he meets at his chemotherapy sessions (Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer). Although it’s not quite an ensemble cast, none of the relationships feel especially privileged either, allowing director Jonathan Levine to really capture the way that serious illness can decentre you in the midst of your own life. Everyone Adam knows is clearly thinking about him all the time, but that’s precisely what makes them feel distant, or prevents him being fully present with any one of them. Treating him with sympathy, then, means refusing to treat him as a mere placeholder for sympathy, as the film opens up a whole series of oblique, incidental, furtive avenues to his condition that gradually gravitate it into a diffuse, washed-out, watercolor dramedy, perfect for the muted Seattle backdrop. And what makes the film so beautiful is that comedy is only ever one avenue among many, only really there at all to prevent the story from becoming too exploitative, in a kind of stopgap against the misery melodrama that might be so oppressive to anyone who has actually experienced Adam (and Reiser’s) situation. Films about illness are often championed for being uplifting, but 50/50 is one of those rare films that feels designed to be life-affirming for those viewers who have actually experienced illness directly, or who might be experiencing it, and there’s a great generosity of realism in that gesture.