Saw the movie 50/50 tonight, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a twenty-something man coming to terms with his cancer diagnosis. Seth Rogen's pitch of the movie on The Daily Show didn't do justice to the premise, but it did get me to check out the trailer. The trailer did a great job of portraying our characters as more than the typical 2D cut-outs we get from cookie-cutter rom-coms dealing with pain and loss, i.e. Sex and Other Drugs or P.S. I Love You.
50/50 could easily be praised simply for its ability to tread the line between comedy and tragedy to paint for us a moving and compelling story of a man dealing with a damning diagnosis. However, I feel that its true strength lies in its ability to create human characters rich with complexity, vices, and virtues. 50/50 also manages to do so without the heavy-handedness and sentimentality of movies like Crash, where we're beat over the head with the didactic "treat everybody nice 'cause you don't know what they've been through" treatment.
50/50 successfully portrays a tenet which politics, nationalism, and religion tend to underplay--that we are all people. "My enemy is my brother or my sister first, and my enemy second."
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