500 Days of Summer (2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
Written by Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
Starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, Zooey Deschanel
Release Date August 7th, 2009
Published August 6th, 2009
500 Days of Summer is going to hit a little too close to home for some audience members. Myself included. Many of you, I'm sure, have experienced a break up. It hurts but in the best of break ups, you know why it happened. There is comfort in knowing. It allows you to correct mistakes and look forward to a time when you can use your newfound awareness of your flaws in a different relationship.
Some break ups however don't end in such a tidy fashion. That is where 500 Days of Summer begins. Tom doesn't know why Summer rejected him. Sure, she's flighty and odd and says that she doesn't believe in love but surely, after all that they do together, relationship stuff, intimate stuff, she must feel something for him.
We flash back to their first meeting. Shy Tommy notices his boss's new secretary, Summer. He says nothing to her. A week passes and he doesn't say anything, just glances at her from his cubicle where he is a successful greeting card writer. Then, one day in the elevator Tom is alone with Summer and she has noticed in his headphones is The Smiths, one of her favorites.
They bond briefly and then go to another level at an office gathering at a karaoke bar. They begin dating and Tom quickly begins to fall in love. Flash forward and miserable Tom vows to try to win her back. Flashback to the night, seemingly out of the blue, when Summer decides that whatever their relationship is, it's over.
Marc Webb is a successful music video director making his feature debut with 500 Days of Summer which begins with a non-dedication dedication to someone we can only assume is Webb's very own Summer. The subtitle is ended with the word bitch and the movie dives quickly into the world of Tom and Summer.
Webb uses music, color and mood to create for 500 Days of Summer a tone and universe that is unique but familiar. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Tom with an innocence and wounded pride that will hit home with any deeply insecure man who has ever thought he met the girl of his dreams.
Zooey Deschanel plays Summer with the unknowing arrogance of real beauty. She knows she's attractive even if she plays it off and her awareness of it only makes her more strangely appealing. She is a trainwreck that Tom, and I'm sure many others, willingly stands in the midst of.
Whether Tom and Summer work out their issues I will leave you to discover. The nature of the film is not necessarily love but loss, heartbreak and the way even the worst of relationships can be romanticized into great tragedy in the eye of the beholder.
The sad truth about memories is that they are much more dramatic, romantic, tragic or humorous in memory than they were in reality. Moreover, we only remember the things we want to remember and remember them as we want to remember them. The scene where Summer dumps Tom is open ended for Tom because in his memory it has never ended.
The fact is, that the relationship we had that ended so painfully ambiguous in our memory was likely over in ways that were quite final. We just simply choose not to remember it the way it happened. 500 Days of Summer is Tom's painful memory of his most significant relationship. We experience it with him and are on his side the whole way as if the memories were our own.
The wondrous part of the movie however is that nagging feeling in the back of the mind that indeed it is all one sided. Tom knows that and in our own relationships we are aware of it too. It's easier to romanticise or demonize former lovers. It's a way of coping that requires less self examination.
500 Days of Summer is smart and sweet and in the performance of Joseph Gordon Levit it has a beautiful, battered, beating heart. Levitt and director Webb play out his memories as embellished facts. The highs are extremely high and the lows are a little more in tune because the sadness is new and easier to recall correctly.
500 Days of Summer is a remarkably intelligent examination of one man's most significant relationship. The exaggerated highs and lows and how one comes to terms with the pain and sadness of losing something that meant so much to them. What a fabulous, fabulous movie.
