Humanizing The Vacuum

Directed by Jonathan Levine from a script based on true life by Will Reiser, 50/50 is the sort of movie in which scenes gleam like newly minted clichés. A morning scene between Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, henceforth known as JGL) and girlfriend Rachel (Bryce Dallas Howard) emits the kind of domestic tranquility created so that the filmmakers can subvert it in a few minutes. We know that as soon as Rachel lays her toothbrush down and gets her hand out of Adam’s ass that (a) a Biblical plague will descend upon him (b) his girlfriend will do Something Terrible to him because men wrote and directed the script.

Thanks to his uncanny talent for projecting conflicted emotions through a Noh Mask of inflexibility, JGL is the most fortuitous casting choice; he’s incapable of a sentimental gesture or false note, unlike 50/50 itself. Whimsy, the first resort of the chowderhead, dominates. When Anna Kendrick as a counselor clears her throat and fumbles through feel-good patter (e.g. “From what I understand it’s really rough. But it will pass”), that’s the end of her performance; she plays New Age Music, as if to underline the point. JGL, reluctantly accepting a pot brownie from Philip Baker Hall, wanders down hospital corridors with an idiotic grin to the accompaniment of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.” As for Seth Rogen, his riffs on blowjobs and abstract art, his token allusion to a historical figure outside the audience’s purview (Gorbachev and his tattoo) — if you laugh at this point, have fun. But there’s a sinister side to the male gaze. With his liberal use of “cunt” and “whore,” Rogen teases the audience’s baser instincts before Levine and Reiser gratify these macho fuckwads by exposing Rachel as a nattering, cheating airhead. Besides one emphatic exchange he isn’t even given the dignity of having a complex reaction to her boyfriend’s undoubted terminal diagnosis.

At least the makers allow Angelica Huston a chance to breathe as Adam’s devastated mother. Taking the audience back to her shattered, drunken amble through grief in 1995′s The Crossing Guard, Huston stops the movie cold the second that JGL snuggles up to her for a hug. But playing an archetype with which men are comfortable, she doesn’t startle; the leash won’t stretch that far. Levine doesn’t suggest why Adam might be wrong about keeping his mother at arm’s length for three quarters of the running time; he raises and dismisses the suspicion with a flurry of tears and Kleenex.