“(500) Days of Summer” takes a tired genre, the romantic comedy, and refashions it into something new and fresh. Director Marc Webb tells you at the start of the movie that ‘This isn’t a love story.’ And he never takes you from Point A to Point B when he tells you about Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel). Instead he jumps from something like day 456 to day 24 and then ahead to say 215, showing you their relationship in a way that’s novel and complex. In fact, you’ve got to pay attention to know what’s happening. Romantic idealist Tom is a greeting card writer when he meets Summer, a free-spirited pragmatist who has a summer job working for the card company. The attraction is swift and mutual, but is interpreted differently by each of them. Summer wants to keep things casual while Tom knows he has found ‘the one.’ Because the screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber focuses on the male perspective, we see Summer from Tom’s point of view. And when you’re in love, or think you are, memory is selective.
The acting of the two leads is perfect. Gordon-Levitt’s smitten innocence to disillusionment is both quirky and haunting. Although Deschanel has the more difficult role, that of portraying someone’s vision of that character, she is nonetheless winsome and bright. And the chemistry between the two is believable and effective. Webb uses other creative devices to provide surprises along the way, including Tom’s life as a French soap opera, a split-screen that balances Tom’s expectations with the less optimistic reality and a song-and-dance number set to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.” “(500) Days of Summer” may not be a love story, but it is definitely about love and it’s definitely worth seeing. 7/23/09
Even though the characters in this film are not teenagers this story is about teenage love. The setting would be more appropriate with a high school senior class somewhere than where it is with two people in their mid to late twenties. This cleverly made picture is paced by a 500 day time study where different aspects of the relationship are tracked by the early to mid to late stages of this "romance" that keep bouncing around. She keeps telling him that she wants no part of a long term relationship and he kept hearing "Love and Marriage". I guess you hear what you want to hear when you’re really not listening.
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