50-50, A Serious Film About a Young Man With a Rare Cancer
The other evening I watched 50/50, a film about a 27 year old man with a rare kind of cancer, a malignant schwannoma. The tumor is growing and pushing into the protagonist’s lower spine. The movie, based in part on the true story of scriptwriter Will Reiser, surprised me by its candor.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt smoothly portrays Adam Lerner, who soon finds out he has cancer. The opening scene captures him jogging in an early morning. He seems a nice, cautious and perceptive young man in a relationship. His rowdier buddy, played hardily by Reiser’s real-life friend Seth Rogan, proves loyal during Adam’s chemotherapy and, later, big spine surgery.
By its cast, I expected this might be a guys’ flick. Yes, there are jokes about sex and cancer. But the film reveals the young man wincing during sex because he’s in pain and can’t hide it. The young women are pretty much all attractive, but they’re not interchangeable props; the relationships are complicated and plausible.
An unexpected perk in the movie is the realistic family dynamic. Lerner’s mother, a worrying sort, wants to be there for her son and doesn’t trust that his girlfriend will sufficiently help him. Anjelica Huston effectively fills the mother’s role. Lerner rarely answers her calls, while she’s biding her time with a husband who, due to Alzheimer’s, doesn’t comprehend what’s going on. She respects her son’s privacy, but feels, understandably, isolated and scared.
The doctors are flawed, of course. The oncologist at the start doesn’t directly tell Lerner of his diagnosis but, instead, speaks into a dictaphone about the malignancy. He refers Lerner to an analyst of some sort, a young woman with little experience, for talk therapy.
When Lerner goes for surgery, the pre-op scene is frighteningly realistic to anyone who’s ever had a young family member go through this kind of surgery. The family and friends are worried. The patient, calmest of all among the group, can’t determine what will be his fate.
The term schwannoma derives from Schwann cells. These elongate cells normally envelop long nerves and rarely become malignant. Most schwannomas, or neurofibromas, are benign; these can cause pain and other symptoms by pressing on nerves, but don’t usually don’t spread or grow quickly. The names can be confusing, as there are several similar-sounding terms for these growths. Some people inherit a disposition to these non-malignant tumors. Rarely, as seems to have been the case in this story, a schwannoma takes an aggressive, invasive and sometimes lethal course. Another name for the cancerous form is malignant peripheral neural sheath tumor, or MPNST.
50/50 refers to the odds of Lerner’s survival, about which he read somewhere on the Internet shortly after his diagnosis. I’d give the movie a high score, 90+, mainly for its lucid, accessible approach to a cancer patient’s experience and concerns.
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