500 Days of Summer is a 2009 offbeat romantic comedy about a woman who doesn’t believe true love exists, and the young man who falls for her.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Ever fall in love? Well Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has. To a girl named Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). For 500 days in fact. The story haphazardly keeps tabs on their relationship, non-linearly landing on significant days and events in their limited time together. Along the way, we learn that Tom is an aspiring architect but actually works (unhappily) as a greeting card writer, but more importantly, it’s learned that while Tom is deeply invested in his feelings for Summer, it is not at all reciprocated. As the story unfolds in the ups and downs of their short history, we get a larger picture that reveals just how influential Summer is for him, even if it never quite is what he hopes it should be. All Summers end in Autumn.
QUICKIE REVIEW: I’ll go ahead and say that while I respect Gordon-Levitt’s long career and his commitment to the craft, I’ve never really been all that much of a fan, from The Dark Knight Rises to Looper, he’s never sold me on his characters, mostly because I simply never stop ‘seeing’ him instead of the person he is playing. Either way, to date, this is my favorite role of his, one where he best embraces the naivety and innocence best, and makes it easy to identify with his agony. While Deschanel has gone on to make ‘quirky girl’ her thing in just about everything she does, here, she does it very well, making for a nice companion film with her far superior earlier work in All The Real Girls. Light and whimsical, purposefully fairytale-like, this is a charming and sometimes bittersweet comedy romance that works.
THAT DANCING IN THE STREET MOMENT: Skipping all around Tom and Summer’s fling is not as complex as it might at first seem, like following someone’s train of thought as they urgently tell of someone they were involved with. My point is, we jump around a lot and in this moment, it happens to be fairly early on in their relationship. It actually starts in Tom’s bedroom, with the two laying together where she tells him she wants them to be casual, which to us says everything, but to a guy like Tom, means he’s still got a chance. A bit later, they end up back in his bed and it seems like they are about to sleep together for the first time, yet her words are lingering in his head like a raging fire so he abruptly heads to the bathroom for a second to remind himself of just that. Looking at himself in the mirror, he talks himself down. This is what casual people do. They just have sex. It means nothing. You can bet those words don’t stick.
After he opens the bathroom door to find Summer naked in his bed, it cuts immediately to the next morning and you already know what sort of happens because well, you’ve been to the movies. Anytime a guy gets laid by the pretty girl of his dreams, comedies always cut to the guy the next morning with an upbeat pop song and a moment of giddy bliss as all things in the world, for right now, are right. It’s usually a brief scene with him walking off an elevator or through a door or whatever. This joke is fast, funny, and final, a quick shot of a very happy dude. 500 Days of Summer, however, takes this to all new levels of intentional absurdity and it works like magic.
Tom exits his apartment and on the soundtrack pops Hall & Oats‘ saccharin love song You Make My Dreams, and away goes Tom, prancing along the sidewalk, the day feeling all kinds of special. He peers into the window of a parked car to check his look, and in his reflection sees Han Solo (who winks at him), then passes in front of a giant fountain, which on cue, erupts into a spray of firecracker-esque water, and then begins the dance, where he sautners up to a woman, kisses her hand and then the whole crowd behind him, like a flash mob, slips into a dance number, all of them seeming to congratulate his sexual success.
But it ain’t over yet. A marching band strolls in and an animated Disney-esque bluebird joins the hoopla and in no uncertain terms, we are feeling the energy of what it feels like to be Tom after sex with Summer. It’s make his dreams come true.
WHY IT’S GREAT: The thing about 500 Days of Summer, directed by Marc Webb, is how well it embraces the lunacy of falling of love as well as the heartbreak, the film a rollercoaster of tonal hills and valleys that, despite its overarching flair for fantasy, somehow always feels real. We get, right from the moment Tom walks out of the bathroom and sees a nude Summer in his bed, that this is not going to be good for him, even if it is exceptionally so in the moment. The truth is already out there, as Summer has made it clear, at least to you and me, that whatever she does with Tom, it’s ‘casual’ and with no deeper meaning. She’s physically attracted to him and wants to have sex but actually, nothing more beyond friends. That’s the weight that hangs over this moment and why it works so well. Tom’s aggrandizing the meaning of this tryst is the takeaway and only perches him higher over the edge where the fall will be much worse.
This little moment is the biggest high Tom gets from Summer, and while Webb purposefully tweaks the tropes of the post-sex moment and goes big, it has this impactful sorrowness about it that, if you’re paying attention to the story, is even more weighty than the joy Tom feels in finally being with the girl of his dreams. I like that 500 Days of Summer is never bitter (even with a very funny opening text scroll), putting as much blame on Tom as it does Summer, if there even is any to dole out. It’s a very sensible fable told with a slightly askewed eye that makes for a terrific bit of fun, especially a walk to work one day after a night in the arms Summer.