At the movies, Death never gets any respect. Among the diverse
fates and dooms available to any movie's characters, he's always the
last guy anyone wants to hang out with. But, in a nice karmic
turnaround, he is indeed the very last guy they'll get to hang out with.
Always the party-pooper, always a drag, ever the least welcome guest at
any table he sups at, people flee for the far horizon fearing the touch
of his scythe or, more often, the very notion that he actually exists,
that he's coming …
Hollywood is in America, where the point of life is that it
must never be allowed to end, and so it mostly practises the
mealy-mouthed approach to death favoured by many of its citizen-ticket
buyers. No one ever actually dies, they "pass", or "pass on", or "go
home to God" in a blaze of retchful sentimentality and outrageous
euphemism. Such understatement is a fig leaf of dignity covering
eventualities as wide-ranging as "he was ground to a fine mince by a
malfunctioning shopping-mall escalator" or "he was eaten away by cancer
until he looked like an ancient and withered infant" or that purely and
simply – and nothing is purer or simpler – he "died".
So we should welcome movies that are ready to gaze Death right in the eye, maybe even sit down and play a little chess with him on the beach. But death is often misty and spectral to such a degree that in the majority of romantic movies about dying partners – Love Story and Dying Young being typical – the illness that's killing the beloved goes entirely undiagnosed and conveniently lacks any symptom that might have a negative impact on the radiant beauty of the moribund patient. (Love Story would have been way better had Ali MacGraw been afflicted with face-eating sores in the Cronenberg manner, but I digress).
The non-romantic approach to death is the one that yields the interesting movies, in my experience, and 50/50 belongs firmly among them, with Harold And Maude, Burt Reynolds's The End, The Barbarian Invasions, even Gus Van Sant's recent Restless. Its twentysomething radio writer protagonist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, essentially playing the movie's writer, Will Reiser), suddenly diagnosed with cancer and offered only the eponymous odds of survival, should make for truly miserable company. But, with best friend Seth Rogen, he makes a party out of passing, pre-emptively shaving off his hair before chemo and using impending death to snag hotties in nightclubs, as the movie makes its serious points about how even this brute fact can be avoided by denial or delusion. The balance between splenetic, foul-mouthed comedy and real pathos is exquisitely maintained throughout, making 50/50 as funny and wise about impending death as Knocked Up was about impending birth.
Perfect pitch is the key here: take one wrong step … well, that way lies Weekend At Bernie's.
- 50/50
- Production year: 2011
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 100 mins
- Directors: Jonathan Levine
- Cast: Anjelica Huston, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Philip Baker Hall, Seth Rogen
So we should welcome movies that are ready to gaze Death right in the eye, maybe even sit down and play a little chess with him on the beach. But death is often misty and spectral to such a degree that in the majority of romantic movies about dying partners – Love Story and Dying Young being typical – the illness that's killing the beloved goes entirely undiagnosed and conveniently lacks any symptom that might have a negative impact on the radiant beauty of the moribund patient. (Love Story would have been way better had Ali MacGraw been afflicted with face-eating sores in the Cronenberg manner, but I digress).
The non-romantic approach to death is the one that yields the interesting movies, in my experience, and 50/50 belongs firmly among them, with Harold And Maude, Burt Reynolds's The End, The Barbarian Invasions, even Gus Van Sant's recent Restless. Its twentysomething radio writer protagonist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, essentially playing the movie's writer, Will Reiser), suddenly diagnosed with cancer and offered only the eponymous odds of survival, should make for truly miserable company. But, with best friend Seth Rogen, he makes a party out of passing, pre-emptively shaving off his hair before chemo and using impending death to snag hotties in nightclubs, as the movie makes its serious points about how even this brute fact can be avoided by denial or delusion. The balance between splenetic, foul-mouthed comedy and real pathos is exquisitely maintained throughout, making 50/50 as funny and wise about impending death as Knocked Up was about impending birth.
Perfect pitch is the key here: take one wrong step … well, that way lies Weekend At Bernie's.
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