(500) Days of Summer

I am always on the look out for movies with an interesting take on love. Granted, they do not end up coming along very often, but I am always looking for weird indie movies about the topic of love. I love the hipster music and dialog of Juno and the quirky characters and tone of a movie like Away We go. I am always interested in movies about love that are the antidotes to Romantic Comedies in the mainstream that hinge on bets, or blackmail or some other nonsense. (500) Days of Summer looked like it was exactly that kind of movie. It was the anti Proposal. As I entered a very full theater Friday night, I started to get worried I had pinned too much on the movie. As the theater filled up with beautiful girls in summer dresses, I started to wonder if this movie would end up being just another romantic comedy.

Tom Hansen(Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn(Zooey Deschanel) are very much wrong for each other. Tom believes he will never be happy until he finds his one true love; Summer does not believe in love or relationships. However, they are drawn to each other. Tom is instantly smitten, which worries his two friends and his far-too-wise-for-her-age sister. He takes breaks up hard and Summer is destined to break his heart. The movie tracks the 500 days of their relationship and break up. Right off the bat, our droll, absent narrator tells us "This is not a love story, it is a story about love." However, the movie's odd sense of self begins far earlier than that, when we get an author's note that states "The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch." From there we know this is not going to be your average love story. Using a broken time line, title cards to tell us where we are in the relationships, a dance sequence, a wonderful split screen device and a script that pops with great lines like "People don't realize this, but loneliness is underrated", 500 Days of Summer tracks the unusual relationship between two people who were never meant to be. Summer never wants to put a label on what they are and Tom is dying inside to just be in love with her and have her be in love with him.

When you fall in love with someone, you tend to love them for their flaws and that is how i feel about (500) Days of Summer. I fell in love with it so early on, that the tiny flaws never bothered me. I fell in love with Joseph Gordon Levitt's pitch perfect performance as a guy so love struck, it takes his little sister to get him to re-see the small moments in the relationships and see the cracks. In a wonderful moment, Tom goes back to all these small moments we saw earlier without a frame of reference and we see them again as the cracks in the foundation of a relationship that was never meant to be. The movie captures the big moments and the small moments with the same care and love. We get the introductions, the amazing break up scene over pancakes, the morning after the first love making (Set to Hall and Oates, no less!), the fights (big and small) and the wonderfully small moments of walking and talking. It plays the way relationships really play in our heads. We see and feel things that are jumbled in our brains. We only see the good until someone tells us to see it how it really happened.

The movie perfectly captures how when we are in love everything seems brighter and when our heart is broken, nothing seems capable of making us smile. It uses music and movies (The Graduate) to help our emotions and the characters emotions. Then it uses all kinds of clever devices that might take some people out of the movie, but that made the movie more real to me. In a scene where Tom goes to a party hosted by Summer, post break up, the movie goes into a split screen where one side is what actually happens and the other side shows Tom's expectations. The results are funny and then heart breaking. Because of the time jumping device, the movie is always whipping from the funny, to the sweet to the absolutely depressing and I think that is really working in favor of the movie. It could be viewed in the proper day order, but it would get very depressing and this time jumping allows the movie to mix the joy and the pain and it allows for really short scenes to come back with a lot more meaning in twenty minutes after it is shown, like the short scene in the record store.

Zooey Deschenal is what makes this movie tick. It is easy to see why a guy would fall in love with her, but Zooey also keeps Summer from being totally likable to us. She is cute and funny, but she has a kind of selfish and cruel streak. The decision was obviously made to keep her always in blue to make those gorgeous blue eyes pop even more, which was totally unnecessary, and would bother me in if I was not so smitten by the movie. I think the writers and the director do such a great job of capturing real love while still making it is too cool and too hip to actually be real. The architectural theme of Tom's life really add to the very earthy feel of the story, but the movie is not afraid of whimsy, which is good because when in love, whimsy feels real to us. It all hinges on what we think of Summer though, and Zooey is so lovely that we never really question why Tom has fallen for a girl who does not believe in the same things in which he believe.

(500) Days of Summer is a breezy, whimsical, bitter and sweet love story that does not give in to typical Hollywood conventions. It will leave you with mixed feelings, but it never once betrays a belief in true love and that love can make someone infinitely happy and infinitely unhappy. The performances might be a bit one-sided, but they work in a movie like this and the dialog is so strong and so in tune with life, love and heart break, that it is clear the makers of this have experienced serious heart break and serious love. At only a little over 90 minutes, "Summer" never gets stale and does not have any scenes are are weak or unimportant. The minute you think you have just watched a throw-away scene, the movie makes that scene relevant later. When the movie ended and all the beautiful girls in summer dresses got up and I saw them in a well lit area, I was reminded just how easy it is to think you have fallen in love and how easy it is to convince yourself you love the wrong person, but that remaining convinced that love is possible is essential. I have no doubt that (500) Days of Summer will be the kind of movie I revisit anytime I need that reminder.

Final Grade: A+ (really an A, but I fell in love with it so flaws do not matter)