Talk about discouraging people from seeing a movie. In one of the first write-ups about 500 Days of Summer that was posted on a blog back in January, the reviewer compared it to Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, and Little Miss Sunshine. Slumdog Millionaire was a terribly overrated piece of staggering mediocrity, and while Juno and Little Miss Sunshine were both enjoyable, they weren’t really anything to write home about. Fortunately, 500 Days of Summer far surpasses the standards set by those films. It’s a surprisingly good first feature film from director Marc Webb, and stars one of my favorite actresses, Zooey Deschanel, as Summer, along with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom. And I just found out a friend of mine, Jessamyn Land, a co-worker from my days working for a television station in Chattanooga, was a Set Production Assistant on the project.
How does one describe 500 Days of Summer? Well, it’s part romantic comedy and part breakup story, for starters, and yes, those do go together. When the lights dim and the story starts, we hear the narrator say, “This is the story of boy meets girl, but this is not a love story.” It’s a tale of someone deeply in love with someone who simply likes him, and all the ways those feelings accompanying the beginning of a romantic relationship color how we see the world. Our two protagonists meet while working for a company that creates greeting cards, and there’s one priceless scene where Tom, played by Gordon-Levitt, has a meltdown in the middle of a brain-storming session for new greeting card ideas. He decries the entire greeting card industry, saying something like, “We give people words to say so they don’t have to say what they’re really thinking.”
Another of my favorite scenes takes place at a party. As Tom starts to walk up the stairs to the apartment where the party is taking place, the screen splits into two panels, the left panel showing his expectations of how the evening will progress, the right side showing what actually happens. And the next five minutes are increasingly uncomfortable, largely due to that fact that we’ve all been there, we all have those memories of handing a gift to “that person” and it being treated like a gift from anyone else, of conversations planned out in our head and then being forced to engage in small talk when there are a thousand other things we’d hoped to say to them, of pretending to be interested in other things happening at the party more than every move that person makes.
Throughout the movie, Tom goes to his little sister for relationship advice, in scenes that sometimes reach too hard for comedy. She tells him to forget Summer, and he says he doesn’t want to forget her, he wants her back. Later, she tells him that the problem is, he’s only remembering the good parts. He needs to remember the bad parts of the relationship too. As Tom starts to replay scenes from those 500 days in his head, instead of the director giving us a long montage of the “bad parts,” we see the bad parts interspersed with the good, a crucial scene reminding us this is not a movie about a good guy and a bad guy but about two very human characters. Tom is not led on by Summer as much as he projects his feelings for her onto the way he imagines – he hopes – she feels for him.
In one scene, an obvious tribute to the montages in When Harry Met Sally where couples describe their relationships, one of Tom’s friends, who is married, starts describing his dream girl and the ways she is “better” than his wife, and then, as if just realizing it himself, says – and I’m quoting from memory here – “But I’d prefer my wife over the dream girl any day. Because she’s not a dream girl – she’s here. She’s real.”
If I’d hated the rest of the film, I think this next thing would have completely changed my mind. As it is, it just made me love the film even more. In one dream sequence (or fantasy sequence) we see a recreation of the central image of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Swedish film The Seventh Seal, a film I frequently recommend to friends, where Tom plays the role of the knight playing chess with Death on the beach. Only in this case, Death is replaced by Cupid. In another scene, we see Tom playing a character – in his mind – in a French film with balloons and mimes, echos of two other films I love, The Red Balloon and the short about the mimes in Paris, je t’aime. Both scenes take you by surprise, and are utterly delightful.
500 Days of Summer opens wide tomorrow, August 31st. Go see it. You won’t be disappointed. And remember the tagline from the poster, a rare instance where a tagline is actually right on the money: “This is not a love story. This is a story about love.”