I watched a movie a couple of days ago called 50/50. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Bryce Dallas Howard, Angelica Huston and Anna Kendrick. I really love these actors; I have seen their other movies, and they are all really good in their movies. I really loved Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer. This movie was pretty serious; it’s categorized as a comedy-drama, but it’s about a 27-year-old man named Adam who finds out he has cancer. It is based on the director’s own experience with finding out he had a rare form of spinal cancer in his 20s. (I also looked up Will Reiser, the director, on Wikipedia and I found out he attended Hampshire College, which is really cool because I took a couple of courses at Hampshire during my time in college and the people there are pretty cool.)
Even though he is a healthy person, Adam receives the cancer diagnosis, and it shatters his world. When he first tells his friend, Kyle (played by Seth Rogen), Kyle acts as if he is going to be okay and that the cancer is no big deal, but as the movie went on, I saw how Adam’s cancer diagnosis took a hit to his self-esteem and made him question his existence in life. It was also hard for his parents to find out about the cancer, especially because Adam was so young and his mom was already taking care of his dad, who has Alzheimer’s. When they are at the dinner table, Adam tries to prepare his mom for the news, and she laughs it off at first, saying “How bad can this really be?” But when he finally tells her he has cancer, she goes silent and then she cries when she finds out because she doesn’t want to lose her son. Adam also sees a therapist named Katherine, who tries to help him process all of the intense emotions that have come with hearing about his diagnosis and going through chemotherapy. At first, Adam doesn’t want to open up and he thinks that Katherine is only trying to make him feel better and cheer him up, but that what she is doing isn’t effective. However, Adam begins to reflect on what is important to him in life after going through chemotherapy. He is still friends with Kyle, and Kyle has his back the whole time, but it’s really hard for Kyle to see his friend going through this intense battle with illness. The scene where Kyle finds out that Adam’s girlfriend, Rachael, cheated on him was pretty sad, but it also showed me how hard it was for both Adam and Rachael when he found out he had cancer. They hadn’t had sex in several weeks and she felt like they were growing apart. She is late picking him up from the hospital one evening and she apologizes, but at this point he is too worn out to hear about her apologies. Kyle goes on a date and finds Rachael making out with another guy, and when Rachael comes home to Adam and pretends like nothing happened, Kyle comes in and tells Adam that Rachael is cheating on him. Rachael is at a loss of words, and Kyle kicks her out of the house. Rachael tries to come back, but Kyle tells Adam that she needs to leave and that they put her box of stuff outside the house. Rachael tries to reason with Adam that it’s been really hard for her lately and that no one picked up her art at her exhibition. At first, I thought Adam was going to feel sorry for her and want to get back together with her, but then Rachael starts kissing Adam and then he realizes that she cheated on him and he tells her to leave. Kyle then starts taking Adam to parties, celebrating his newly single status, and he tells Adam to use his cancer diagnosis as a tool to pick up girls, but it ends up not working out well. They go out with two girls, and one of them is curious about Adam’s cancer and asks if she could touch his bald head. He lets her, and they go home, but while Adam and the girl are having sex, Adam feels a lot of pain and is too tired from the chemotherapy to have sex, so the girl ends up leaving.
Adam’s cancer diagnosis gets him to start thinking seriously about what he wants out of life. In one hard-hitting scene, Kyle is drunk and wants to drive Adam home, but Adam insists on driving Kyle even though he neither knows how to drive nor has a driver’s license. Kyle at first doubts him, but then he lets him drive since Adam doesn’t have long to live. Adam almost gets them killed and almost hits other cars. Kyle finally has him pull over and shouts at him for his erratic driving and Adam has him get out of the car. Then Adam screams and then breaks down crying because he doesn’t have long to live, and nothing in his life is going as planned. He feels hopeless, but what helps is him calling Katherine to let her know that he is really not feeling okay. This was a total contrast to when he first met her because at first, when she tried to get him to open up, he didn’t want to talk about how he was feeling and insisted he was fine, even when he was going through a very intense chemotherapy process that made him feel like hell. But he realizes that it’s okay to reach out to people and admit that you aren’t okay. Katherine and Adam develop feelings for each other, and Adam begins to feel like he can trust her because she gives him space to feel what he is feeling. Adam also realizes that Kyle is also trying his best to support him because he goes back home and sees that Kyle has been reading a book called Facing Cancer Together, which shows that even though Adam thought Kyle was only focused on sleeping with women and getting high on weed with Adam, he really was doing his best to try and understand what Adam was going through and was willing to do the work needed to support Adam. I thought about this movie called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which is about a young man in high school named Greg who doesn’t have a lot of close friends but ends up befriending a young woman named Rachel, who has leukemia. At first, she doesn’t want him around, but as the movie goes on, they develop a strong bond and he and his friend, Earl, support Rachel through her battle with leukemia. It was a pretty sad movie, but it reminded me that facing illness is a battle that you can’t fight alone. I thought about this chapter I read in a book called The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace by philosopher Daisaku Ikeda. The chapter “Facing Illness” talks about illness and death from a Buddhist perspective, and Ikeda says that “illness teaches us many things. It makes us look death in the face and think about the meaning of life. It makes us realize just how precious life is.” (p. 255) I haven’t battled cancer, but I have battled mental illness, specifically clinical depression, and honestly, depression really forced me to look at how I was living my life and got me to examine honestly how I wanted to live my life moving forward. I had thought that I was so useless, that my life had no value or meaning, but through getting professional treatment and engaging in my spiritual practice of Buddhism, I have learned that my life has so much profound meaning and that I can encourage others who are battling depression that it’s okay to ask for help. For so many years I was reluctant to see therapy, to get on medication, but I am realizing that those things are important to taking care of my mental health. In the book I highlighted this one quote in the chapter that really encouraged me: “Though one may be ill, this has no bearing on the inherent nobility, dignity and beauty of one’s life. Everyone, without exception, is an infinitely precious and noble treasure.” (The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, part 1, revised edition, page 254) I had to read this quote often because having depression made me feel like my life was worthless, that I wasn’t going to be able to live my life because I have depression, but I learned that I’m not the only one struggling and that it’s okay to ask for help. I realized after a certain point that it wasn’t safe for me to continue tackling depression without seeking professional help, and that getting professional help or treatment didn’t make me weak. I love reading the “Facing Illness” chapter in the book because it reminds me that my life is still worthy of respect and valuable even though I have this depression that is telling me that my life doesn’t mean anything. It’s still a battle, but I am hoping to encourage more people through sharing about my mental health challenges more often.
Another part of 50/50 I liked was when Adam made friends in the hospital who were also battling cancer. The first time he meets Mitch and Alan, Alan offers Adam cannabis-laced macaroons and Adam eats a few, and he finds himself going down a hallway with this dazed look on his face and it seems like he is heaven, even as he passes all these people on stretchers and the nurses and doctors running through the halls on these stretchers. Adam looks back and then starts laughing, but then he snaps back to reality, and he is back at home throwing up in a toilet. He develops a great friendship with Mitch and Adam, but then when he finds Mitch is not with him and Alan, Alan tells him that Mitch died. It’s during this scene that Adam has to grapple with the reality that he is dealing with a life-threatening illness, and it makes him feel depressed and wondering why he is still living. Even though Kyle at the beginning was telling Adam, “Oh you’re young, you’ll be fine,” Adam realizes that he can’t take life for granted anymore because he only has a 50/50 chance of living. The pivotal scene comes when Adam and his parents are at the doctor after Adam has gone through chemotherapy, and they are hearing the news of whether the tumor has gotten less or worse. The doctor tells him that the cancer has gotten bad and that they need to do a surgery on Adam to get the tumor out, but that it’s a life-threatening surgery. Adam gets the surgery, and right before he goes in, his mom hugs him and doesn’t want to let him go, but the doctors pull her away and lead Adam into the surgery room. It was pretty painful to see Adam’s parents being unable to spend more time with their son before the surgery because they didn’t know whether he was going to come out alive after the life-threatening surgery. Thankfully, he survives, but that scene was pretty intense. It was easy for me to think that because I was young, I didn’t have to worry about illness and dying, and I thought very much like Kyle, this attitude of “Oh, you’re young, you’ll beat cancer.” But many of my close friends who were older passed away, and it really made me face my own mortality, the inevitable reality that someday I, too, was going to die, so I started to study more about the Buddhist perspective on life and death. Reading this philosophy made me want to take my life more seriously, and I started to get more serious about what goals and dreams I wanted to accomplish. I have started to appreciate my life on a much deeper level, too.
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