the blog of nathan loding

(500) Days of Sum­mer
Star­ring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel
Directed by: Marc Webb
Writ­ten by: Scott New­stadter and Michael H. Weber
Rated: PG-13
Rat­ing: 5 (five out of five)

I don’t like chick flicks.  Well, I usu­ally don’t.  I will admit to lik­ing one or two, here or there.  When Harry Met Sally comes to mind.  I’ve always found it annoy­ing when a movie nav­i­gates it’s plot points with pre­dictable ennui.  I under­stand why so many peo­ple find them appeal­ing – the fairy-tale essence and the good, happy, roman­tic end­ing – and I appre­ci­ate that.  I just don’t like it myself.  My col­lec­tion of movies is decid­edly darker, and I don’t think that’s just because of my per­son­al­ity.  I’ve always looked towards art to reflect back to me what I see every day, and the art that does that I find attractive.

So I liked 500 Days of Sum­mer (which is to be referred to with­out the e.e. cummings-like punc­tu­a­tion for the rest of this review).  It was dif­fer­ent, and more a reflec­tion of real­ity than most love sto­ries these days.

The film is told in a series non-sequential flash­backs, going back­wards and for­wards through the character’s rela­tion­ship.  Non-linear story telling is noth­ing new, but I think it’s the first time I’ve seen it applied to a love story – except, as the Nar­ra­tor tells us, “This isn’t a love story.  It’s a story about love.”

Levitt plays Tom Hansen, some­one who has almost been an observer to his own life.  He went to school to become an archi­tect, but spends his days writ­ing the insides of greet­ing cards.  Enter Sum­mer (Deschanel), who has just moved to L.A. from Michi­gan and has landed her­self a job as Tom’s boss’s assis­tant.  Tom is instantly in love.

He truly believes that Sum­mer is The One, The Only One, from the very begin­ning.  After a few days and some help­ful prod­ding from his friends, Sum­mer and Tom end up together.  From the very start, Sum­mer is very plain and dis­arm­ingly hon­est about what she wants – in her first real con­ver­sa­tion with Tom, she tells him she doesn’t want a rela­tion­ship.  Shortly after­ward, she makes sure Tom under­stands that all she wants is to be friends.  Tom hears what he wants.  He hears “take it slow” and “see where it goes.”

Tom has long believed in fairy tales and he doesn’t see what’s in front of him.  He sees what the fairy tales have led him to believe and he thinks that Sum­mer shares this.  But as the Nar­ra­tor told us at the very begin­ning, “This isn’t a love story.  It’s a story about love.”

Deschanel is just per­fect as Tom’s tan­ta­liz­ing object of obses­sion.  She sees Tom for exactly who he is and likes him for exactly that.  She’s smart, funny, beau­ti­ful, play­ful, and it’s Tom’s bad luck that he can’t help but fall in love with her.

Sum­mer is a bit mys­te­ri­ous in this movie.  We’ve all been so trained by Hollywood’s clichéd romance movies that we expect she’ll change and see that Tom is It.  When she doesn’t, she becomes mys­te­ri­ous.  The film almost instantly leaves the love story arc and heads into unex­plored waters.  We only see her through Tom’s eyes, and what he doesn’t under­stand, we don’t either.

The direc­tor bor­rows from other pieces of art to help dis­play Tom’s feel­ings.  Glimpses of Fellini, Dis­ney, and French post-modernism explain what’s going on inside with­out being lit­eral about it.  There’s even a nod to When Harry Met Sally.

When you look back on a years worth of related events, espe­cially that of a rela­tion­ship, you tend not to see it exactly as it hap­pened.  You see it in glimpses that aren’t chrono­log­i­cal; you see ref­er­ences from movies, books, and TV; you see things not quite as they were, but as a height­ened expe­ri­ence of what hap­pened.  In other words, it plays out like 500 Days of Sum­mer.

Which is why it’s a great film.

(As a side note, a few of my friends com­plained about the end­ing.  While I can under­stand their com­plaint with the very last scene, I com­pletely dis­agree and thing that there was no more apro­pos an end­ing for this film than what was pre­sented.  Even the name of the girl applied.)

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I98WnMhGGEE

Who is Jen­nifer Beck­man?  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1209556/500-Days-Summer-Revenge-writing-film-girl-dumped-you.html?ITO=1490