[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]A bumper sticker summary might read “chick flick for guys,” but that would be a glib description for a film that inverts Hollywood’s usual cut-and-paste gender roles on-screen romances. This time around, it falls to the guy – played with a sparkling despair by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that almost makes us forget his part in the trashy G.I. Joe – to fulfill the thankless, tormented role of a lovesick romeo. Tom Hansen, narration tells us, grew up convinced that “the one” was out there; true love, soul mates, the works. Zooey Deschanel, charming and complex, plays Summer Finn, a wistful young woman who does not believe in love and resists efforts to categorize relationships. When, throughout the course of 500 days, it seems like Tom and Summer are happy together, perish the thought of labeling them boyfriend/girlfriend.
(500) Days of Summer is a romance in the sense that, like a Byronic hero, Tom is an incurable romantic who suffers magnificently for his faith in love. The film also has many funny moments, with a comic mismatch between expectations and reality driving Tom’s attempt to find love with Summer. This isn’t a romantic comedy, however. Pay heed to the narrator when he says this isn’t a love story. He means it. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber – not so much. The affair brings to mind Michel Gondry’s surreal crypto-romance The Science of Sleep, in which attraction and destruction act against each other, leaving the characters in a limbo that questions the possibility of love. A similar tension is at work here. Tom’s deluded idealism confronts Summer’s honest cynicism; both end up with unexpected fractures in their respective foundations. A precious, rug-pulling ending, however, demonstrates the screenwriters’ lack of faith in both audiences and the raw material of their script, as if we need to be given a warm-and-fuzzy handout as comfort for witnessing the ravages of unrequited love. In a film more or less defined by blunt-force honesty, the cuter-than-cute shenanigans – the ending always lingers best – deflates genuinely strong scenes like the one in which Tom, who never followed through on his architectural studies by becoming an architect, explodes at the triteness and dehumanizing convenience of greeting cards. It’s a beautifully performed and written encapsulation of the problem dividing Tom and Summer. Then the screenwriters, who so far resist genre conventions, hit us with one of those wildly implausible coincidences that define the romantic comedy genre. So much, then, for an honest appraisal of love in counter-programming to artificially sweetened rom-coms.
Good but also mixed is Marc Webb’s directorial efforts. The non-chronological storytelling, marked by slides illustrating at what day in the 500 days a scene occurs, is meticulous and without a hint of disorientation. Performances are uniformly good, although it’s disappointing to see Matthew Gray Gubler play the part of best buddy using the same delivery as his Dr. Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds. And the film is very handsome to look at, from the graphic design of the slides to X’s cinematography and the architectural fetish – LA’s Bradbury building, with its beautiful wrought-iron interior ever looking back to the 19th century, remains a jewel for filmmakers. Despite all that, Webb has no eye for Los Angeles as a character, filming it as if it were New York rather than the peculiar construction that it is. Tight shots, confined spaces; Webb implies an uncharacteristic density in his view of LA. He selects romantic architecture to fit Tom’s preferences, but ignores the landmarks and quirky (sometimes aggravating) qualities that make LA a paradoxical blend of unabashed forward-looking fantasy and gritty urban grind. It’s the social context of living in LA, in other words, that’s missing, a result of seeing LA for the buildings and not the city. The irony is that for all that Tom loves architecture and finds his journey culminating with a rekindling of that love, the film forgets one of the most vital notions of architecture: the built environment shapes our living experiences.
Neither let-down keeps (500) Days of Summer from offering a strong, enjoyable detour into street-level romance, something a bit more down-to-earth than is typical. But as Maxwell Smart was fond of saying, the film “misses it by that much” – and that’s a shame.
Entertainment: * (out of two)
Craft: ** (out of two)
Directed by Marc Webb. Screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Grace Moretz. 95 minutes. Rated PG-13 for sexual material and language.
Frédérik invites you to discuss (500) Days of Summer with him at his blog.