500 Days of Summer
Directed by Marc Webb
Three and One Half Stars
The day before a relationship ends, you can only think about all the things that are crap about your present situation. The day after a relationship ends, all you can think about is the good times you and your now ex-significant other had. This pattern of misremembering, exaggerating and romanticizing is how humans work through the grief of essentially losing a loved one. Some days are filled with disappointment when all you can think about are the times that brought you happiness. Other days are filled with regret when you can only think of the times that brought you pain, or in which you behaved in a way that brought pain to someone else.
Mark Webb's 500 Days of Summer, a delightful film that works as both a comedy, a romance, and even sometimes as a musical, reflects the real-like workings of a human mind when pondering what went wrong in a romance. We don't start at the beginning, we start somewhere in the middle. Then with each scene, the movie jumps around to different sections of the relationship between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), whose romance is doomed from the start. We can tell that, and Tom can probably tell that too, but he's darned if he isn't going to set himself up for a fall. In real life, we all do that.
The romance is doomed from the start because from the second he sees her, Tom idolises the cute, slightly alternative new personal assistant that sits across the office from him. The ability to idolise and idealise a new partner is vital in romance. Tom, as we all are wont to do from time to time, overdoes it. He extrapolates from a single-word greeting one morning that Summer's weekend consisted entirely of having great sex with someone who isn't him. When Summer agrees to let Tom ever-so-slightly in, he celebrates like he's won the lottery. But Summer is always a bit aloof, and we get the sense that "it's not you, it's me" isn't just a cliche for her. She constantly expresses doubt at the existence of 'love', and proclaims that she doesn't want to be anybody's anything, let alone girlfriend.
Tom and Summer's romance lasts for (you guessed it), 500 days, and the nature of their relationship is such that both characters could wind up being deeply unlikable, annoying, or both. Fortunately these characters are in the hands of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, two actors that are building impressive bodies of work. Gordon-Levitt is a long way from home when we consider his beginnings were in the sometimes funny but often cookie-cutter sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun", but eclectic and fine performances in films like Brick, The Lookout and Mysterious Skin have earned him respect in the movie industry, if not wild mainstream success. Deschanel manages, somehow, to make Summer seem not like a heartless bitch who seems to enjoy playing games with Tom's heart.
Rich in humour and warmth, 500 Days of Summer marks the debut of Mark Webb, a former music video director. His experience in that shortened medium is evident in several lovely vignettes that work well as stand-alone small films -- an animated sequence in which Tom's heart melts, a split-screen scene that breaks our hearts, and yes, even a musical number. But beneath all the gimmicks, this is a film that actually has something to say about the nature of human relationships. By the end of the film, Tom is like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver in that we can almost hear the romantic time-bomb ticking away as the credits roll. Tom never learns. But, then again, neither do the rest of us.
Mark Webb's 500 Days of Summer, a delightful film that works as both a comedy, a romance, and even sometimes as a musical, reflects the real-like workings of a human mind when pondering what went wrong in a romance. We don't start at the beginning, we start somewhere in the middle. Then with each scene, the movie jumps around to different sections of the relationship between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), whose romance is doomed from the start. We can tell that, and Tom can probably tell that too, but he's darned if he isn't going to set himself up for a fall. In real life, we all do that.
The romance is doomed from the start because from the second he sees her, Tom idolises the cute, slightly alternative new personal assistant that sits across the office from him. The ability to idolise and idealise a new partner is vital in romance. Tom, as we all are wont to do from time to time, overdoes it. He extrapolates from a single-word greeting one morning that Summer's weekend consisted entirely of having great sex with someone who isn't him. When Summer agrees to let Tom ever-so-slightly in, he celebrates like he's won the lottery. But Summer is always a bit aloof, and we get the sense that "it's not you, it's me" isn't just a cliche for her. She constantly expresses doubt at the existence of 'love', and proclaims that she doesn't want to be anybody's anything, let alone girlfriend.
Tom and Summer's romance lasts for (you guessed it), 500 days, and the nature of their relationship is such that both characters could wind up being deeply unlikable, annoying, or both. Fortunately these characters are in the hands of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, two actors that are building impressive bodies of work. Gordon-Levitt is a long way from home when we consider his beginnings were in the sometimes funny but often cookie-cutter sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun", but eclectic and fine performances in films like Brick, The Lookout and Mysterious Skin have earned him respect in the movie industry, if not wild mainstream success. Deschanel manages, somehow, to make Summer seem not like a heartless bitch who seems to enjoy playing games with Tom's heart.
Rich in humour and warmth, 500 Days of Summer marks the debut of Mark Webb, a former music video director. His experience in that shortened medium is evident in several lovely vignettes that work well as stand-alone small films -- an animated sequence in which Tom's heart melts, a split-screen scene that breaks our hearts, and yes, even a musical number. But beneath all the gimmicks, this is a film that actually has something to say about the nature of human relationships. By the end of the film, Tom is like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver in that we can almost hear the romantic time-bomb ticking away as the credits roll. Tom never learns. But, then again, neither do the rest of us.
Jonathan Fisher
September 24, 2009
Originally Featured in The Film Brief
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