by Ben Howard
The film 50/50 focuses on a young 20-something named Will
Reiser (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and his struggle with cancer and how it changes
his everyday life and his view on friends, love and family. It’s easy to
focus on the main character of this movie, he’s the hero, he’s the one who
overcomes cancer, but I’m more intrigued by the supporting characters and what
they show us about how to treat people going through devastating moments in
their lives. In particular, I want to
focus on Will’s girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) and his best friend Kyle
(Seth Rogen).
Our natural instinct in a situation like this, a tragedy in
the life of a friend, is to play the role of the savior. We swallow our pain and assert our strong
stoic exterior. Often it feels like
their pain is more important than ours and as a result we no longer express our
emotions in a truthful way.
This is the
tack taken by Rachael. Will offers her
an opportunity to leave the relationship, but she can’t take it even though
later events will make it obvious that she wants to go. This is natural, we don’t want to leave
because we want to be the kind of person who can withstand the trauma and the
heartache of a tragedy. We want to be
the kind of people who can be relied on. We have to be strong, and strong people don’t crack, they don’t
break. Until they do.
Eventually, Will discovers that Rachael has been
cheating on him and breaks up with her. She vents because he doesn’t understand how difficult it’s been for her. She’s right and he doesn’t, but it’s because
she would not allow it. We don’t do
those we love any favors when we pretend to have strength we don’t have and
pretend we don’t feel things that we really do. Honesty and authenticity are vital.
On the other hand we have Kyle. At points in the movie, Kyle comes across as
an immature child and a miserable excuse for a best friend. However, the movie comes to affirm that this
is kind of the point. Kyle IS an
immature child, and at times he IS a miserable excuse for a best friend, and he
treats Will the exact same regardless of his illness. He treats Will like a person instead of a
disease. Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly
wrote that Kyle’s, “fundamental, unexpected decency, which can often only be
expressed through shoulder-punching obscenities, grows more quietly moving as
the picture wears on.”
He isn’t perfect and
he often acts out of his own selfish reasoning, but he doesn’t change who he is. Near the end of the movie, we discover that
Kyle’s character has been reading a book about supporting a friend going throw cancer,
in a quick shot of the book we realize that one of the passages underlined simply
says, “Be There.”
I think this is at the
crux of dealing with tragedy and dealing with pain. We want to fix things so badly, we want to make
things better, we want to provide comfort and explanations when there are none available,
but the more I think about it the more I believe that we just need to be there even
if that’s just shoulder-punching and obscenities.
Peace,
Ben
You can contact me on Twitter
@BenHoward87, via email or just leave a comment. Recommendations and guest posts are always appreciated.
Very well-said. One can also yell, "This is TERRIBLE!' Sometimes that's nice too :). Thank you for sharing this.
ReplyDelete