Now boys, getting cancer is no reason to become neo-nazi skinheads, okay?
dir: Jonathan Levine
Cancer is a hard sell. It’s okay for those four-hanky weepies they make for the abundance of chick channels on cable, but for a comedy drama with nice, liked actors in it, you have to think a lot of people apart from the creative ones involved would have been a bit leery or at least anxious.
“Who’s going to see this?” muttered one studio executive, tugging on his soul patch and massaging his shoulder where Consuela, his usual deep-tissue masseuse had failed to work out the knot that had been bugging him all week.
“I mean, it’s a bit of a bring-down, isn’t it? Can’t he have, like, a cold or something less depressing?”
“What about lupus?” said his female counterpart, fighting the urge to think about food denied to herself at least until daylight hours were over. “Lupus would play well to 27 to 39-year-old one legged lesbians who like blue blankets, at least that’s what our data shows. What about an earache? No, we don’t want to alienate the people with sore eyelids. How about AIDS? Everyone loves AIDS. That’ll get the, you knows, into the theatres.”
“They have so much disposable income, they’ll buy a hundred tickets each! And we’ll make it in 3D! Perfect! Francine?”, he bellows into the adjoining office at his assistant, “get these Seth Rogen and Will Reiser shmucks on the line, and tell ‘em to change the screenplay to say the main character’s got AIDS. Whaddya mean the person it’s about, Will Reiser, had cancer? If I tell him it’s AIDS he had, then it’s AIDS, or I’ll run his weedy ass outta town on a fuckin’ rail. And Seth Rogen doesn’t get to tell me what to do just because he lost some weight and went all Hollywood. Fuck that Canadian wheatgrass drinking derelict. I’ll send him back to Saskatoon if he doesn’t change the goddamn script…”
And so on, and so on. That’s my pained and convoluted way of saying that while studios put out a fair number of flicks dealing with illness and cancer, they generally err on the side of weepy or stupid, or often two for the price of one. Even the true stories get so mangled that they’re less a life-affirming example we can all relate to, and more an exercise in torment. Apropos of nothing I’m just going to scream really loudly that The Bucket List was a fucking terrible film about two guys with cancer.
Just so you know, that’s how I feel. And a lot of reviewing is about feelings. It’s not about mise en scene and diagetic sound, or thematic complexity and Tarkovskian scene composition. It’s just saying “this film worked for me, because it felt like they got it right.” And I really liked this film. It was touching and sweet, and affecting without being manipulative or treacly.
Adam, very, very well played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the stand-in for Will Reiser, fellow writer and friend to Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. They lived this story, and Rogen’s playing himself, so clearly he knows what it was like to be the protective but obnoxious friend of someone who went through such a horrible experience.
And it’s thoroughly horrible, please don’t think I’m making light of it. I think it’s rare for any of us not to have had family or friends diagnosed with it, or killed by it, by now. It strikes kids, it strikes oldies, like my dad and uncle; it gets the rich and poor, strikes awful people and nice people, too. It’s not selective, it’s not picky, it’s a purely equal opportunity reaper.
Adam doesn’t even know he’s got it until some minor back pain gets him to the doctor. An MRI later, and some completely disinterested doctor is explaining to him in highly technical language as to how fascinating the elements of the lethal cancerous growth on his spine is, in purely scientific terms.
And so, onto the debilitative courses of chemo, in the hopes of reducing the mass to make it more safely operable. Adam is a young guy. It’s no more a tragedy, in realistic terms, that this has happened to him and not someone else. But we feel for him, not because of the injustice of it all, but because he seems like a nice chap.
He is advised to take advantage of the counselling services provided by the hospital, who appoint someone younger and seemingly even less experienced with counselling than Adam himself. Katherine (Anna Kendrick) is doing a doctorate in palliative therapy, as opposed to someone who’s experienced as a therapist. So she’s good at textbook quoting relevant to what she thinks Adam is going through when he’s talking to her, rather than believing what he says when he expresses himself. She, and quite rightly so, maintains the professional and necessary distance that would be an absolute prerequisite in such a career if she didn’t want to burn out within a week, but the film sets it up so that the more she works towards dissolving the patient / therapist boundaries, the better or at least more helpful she becomes as a therapist. Kendrick is great in this role, as she is in pretty much anything I see her in these days.
Rogen’s character, keen to be the comic relief that any cancer story requires, amps up his overbearing personae to almost unbearable levels, constantly yelling and overacting in scenes when everyone else is pretty much chilled out. I guess it was necessary. I’m not saying he’s bad, at all. I’ve seen bad Seth Rogen performances. This is not one of them. But he’s certainly over the top in a flick whose greatest virtues arise from the low-key way Gordon-Levitt deals with his cancer and the people around him. There are no great revelations, no emotional climaxes, no perfect words that make everything okay. There's just trudging through with a modicum of hope that you'll get through.
It’s probably not worth the attention I’m going to give it, but they also seem to be scoring a spot of vengeance on someone Will Reiser might have been seeing when he started going through this nightmare. Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) is all sympathetic and teary when Adam is diagnosed, and she gives all the assurances that she’ll be there for him and such, but she buckles under the pressure of Adam’s illness. At least that’s the slack I’m cutting for her, and that’s not because she’s a very pale skinned redhead. The film doesn’t cut her that same amount of slack, not by a long shot, making her out to be more of a villain than cancer itself.
Kyle (Rogen), out on a date he’s wangled by using Adam’s cancer to his advantage, sees Rachael getting her sweet ass squeezed and making out with a bearded long-haired guy at a gallery opening. He photographs the betrayal in order to prove it to Adam, bellowing loudly about what a bitch she is and such, all the while denigrating the chap who was lucky enough to be the squeezer of said ass, by calling him a Jesus looking hippy long-haired bum and all that noise.
It occurred to me that the guy looked a lot like me, or at least I kinda look like him. And that shit just ain’t right, Rogen. I don’t knock guys for looking pudgy and Jewish, do I? So lay off the longhair Jesus lookalikes, all right? Someone who starred in that terrible Green Hornet flick isn’t in a position to be criticising anybody about anything, you compulsive masturbating clownshoe.
Adam does the only thing anyone could do given the circumstances, and we can understand that, but the flick goes too far in getting its metaphysical revenge on this other person by really letting Rachael have it. I don’t know why they get Bryce Dallas Howard to play unlikable characters all the time. Maybe Hollywood just doesn’t like redheads, or maybe they’re getting back at Ron Howard through his daughter, who knows. But she’s marginally more demonised here than she was in The Help, and in that flick they had her character eat shit and not die, so go figure.
Of course a flick like this isn’t going to convey the meaningful stuff about the experience just by focussing on the minutia of his treatment, though there are some good scenes with fellow sufferers played ably by Matt Frewer and Philip Baker Hall (the one who played Nixon, not the chubby pervert who played Capote). It’s more about Adam sorting out his feelings with the people around him. Sure, there’s the helplessness in the face of oblivion and pain, but there’s the untold and unexpressed, the intangibles, the unnecessary desire to protect those who care about him by minimising what he’s going through, the multitude and lifetime of other issues that something like this has brought to the fore.
And yet the flick doesn’t insult us by resolving all or any of these issues. It chugs along with Adam as the centre, as he good-naturedly but with increasing moroseness tries to deal with everything that’s going on, including the unwanted and useless sympathies being strewn at his door like so many plastic roses. He neither attacks the ‘problem’ with a lust for life, nor does he embark upon a cowardly battle with the cancer, he just gets through whatever way he can, hoping for the best and increasingly being convinced that the worst is coming.
I really enjoyed the heck out of this flick. If there is any justice in this world, Joseph Gordon-Levitt at least should get a Best Actor nomination at the Oscars this year. If he doesn’t, there’s no fucking justice in this cold universe, and we already know there isn’t. So, too, should there be a Best Screenplay nod for Will Reiser, for transforming his horror into quality entertainment for us shmucks in the audience. We laughed a little, we cried a little, and I speak on behalf of everyone everywhere by saying that I hope Will’s cancer doesn’t come back, in the way that I don’t want it to come back for anyone anywhere. Isn’t life hard enough even without monstrous cancers eating away at us from the inside?
There’s a better than 50/50 chance that you’ll survive watching this film, and even more so, a better than 50/50 chance that you’ll enjoy it. Well done, chaps, well done.
8 times Joseph Gordon-Levitt is just wonderful out of 10
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“You could have totally fucked the shit out of that girl.”
- “No one wants to fuck me. I look like Voldemort.” – so wrong, Adam, plenty of Death Eaters would eat more than death to spend some quality time with the Dark Lord – 50/50
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