After Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) loses his girlfriend Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), his buddy and coworker McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend), whose main role in life seems to be to support his friend, quotes Henry Miller, advising Tom that they way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature. The film opens with an author’s note alluding to one Jenny Beckman, who is apparently a bitch, as the one person who serves as possible inspiration for a character in 500 Days of Summer. It’s probable that director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have adapted Miller’s dictation and applied it to film, although it really doesn’t matter. That opening author’s note is a poorly executed and rather banal gimmick, surprisingly ineffective in a film that thrives off wonderful, risky, surrealistic touches: some of which are funny and others which are profoundly sad.
500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy with a fractured time sequence. It is wisely less concerned about how Tom and Summer get together as it is with their time spent as a couple and the aftermath of their break-up. This separates it from the majority of romantic comedies, which mostly take about ninety minutes getting two people together through the most convoluted situations imaginable. Here we have a film that knows that it’s easy for two young, good looking individuals to start dating each other. Tom and Summer work together. He writes greeting cards, she’s the assistant to his boss. One night the whole office goes out to karaoke, she falls in love with him, watching him perform, the next day they kiss by the copy machines. Boom, bang, done.
The film that 500 Days of Summer is comparable to is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, another film showing the development and fall of an interesting relationship, from the point of view of a male protagonist. It too uses surrealistic touches. However, in Annie Hall those moments are used to portray Alvy Singer’s desires. He’s either romancing the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, discovering what his former classmates have become, or pulling out Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster to prove a point to a total stranger. These moments compliment Alvy’s self-centered persona. The use of surrealism in 500 Days of Summer is to portray heightened visuals of Tom’s inner emotions. When he is feeling elated and confident, it appears as if everyone on the street is smiling at him right before they transform into Broadway showmen and break out into a choreographed dance number. When Tom is feeling anxiety over an upcoming interaction with Summer, a split screen parallels Tom’s expectations for his evening with the actual encounter. This technique simultaneously reflects his hopes and dreams while showing the façade he must present amidst tragic disappointment.
When Tom isn’t in fantasyland he’s at his job, writing greeting cards. He wears sweater-vest and tie combinations or t-shirts that promote bands like The Clash, who haven’t needed promotion since they broke up in the mid eighties. That’s the problem with Tom, who like most hipsters, is living in a time warp. Upset by modern culture, he constantly pontificates about how horrible it is that women don’t dress like they did in England in nineteen sixty-four or how he hates to live in a world where no one has heard of an alternative, indie rock band that he happens to like. This hipster mentality borders on fascism as Tom, the failed architect, confides to Summer that if he were in charge he would make people notice the beauty in Los Angeles. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom with equal amounts confidence and nervousness. We like him despite his trendy, social attires and worldviews. He’s funny and spontaneous, but fragile too. And in all fairness, when he does don a suit he looks totally out of place. After all, how bad can anybody be when their heartbroken dreams transport them into Ingmar Bergman films?
Summer is not as easy to understand. She could have used the guidance of a female writer on her side. When the often annoying narrator isn’t condescendingly telling us how we are supposed to feel about the characters, what the characters are thinking, or just blatantly stating the themes of the film, it serves a purpose in relaying Summer’s back-story. The narrator informs us that Summer has some sort of inherent knack that makes every man attracted to her, and she knows it. She’s like Christine in The Rules of the Game: every man wants her; we’re not exactly sure why. At least Christine had a famous composer father, which justified Octave’s fascination. Summer just has long, black hair, and beautiful blue eyes. Well, I guess that’s enough. Summer, too is a hipster, which explains Tom and Summer’s mutual fascination with each other. When she proclaims her favorite Beatle is Ringo, I was just surprised that it wasn’t Pete Best.
After these two get together the movie really starts cooking. Despite the jumbled chronology, the film is more or less in order. Harold Pinter would probably just call this a straight forward narrative. Anyway, the relationship between the two expresses the joy of early love. They play house in a department store; he draws the skyline on her arm. The conversations never run too deep. Their break-up comes along at the moment when they would begin to confide more to each other. After they break up, the film hits a perfect note. They’re still friends. Tom’s still madly in love with Summer, but she’s moved on. We move deeper and deeper into Tom’s head, as we share his sadness and longing in a way that we couldn’t really share his desires or happiness. He’s with Summer, but not with Summer. Their moments together become painful as they get on each other’s nerves, and gradually separate. This all leads up to a moment when they go see The Graduate together. Never has that last shot felt so sad and empty; Elaine and Ben Braddock, sitting next to each other on the bus, with their future ahead of them. But what future? How far can love take two lost souls? This open-ended ending will continue to haunt generations of alienated teens. 500 Days of Summer, should have paid a bit more attention to Mike Nichols’ film, and ditched it’s cutesy epilogue segment, which is not in tune with the rest of the film, providing closure for these characters. I don’t need or want closure, I want these characters to be suspended in space and time, immortal.
-Jason Bardin
3 Comments so far
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In twenty years, we’re going to (hopefully) look back on this as Marc Webb’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door?, the film that, although imperfect, announced the coming of a great new director to the industry.
Comment by Paul
08.02.09 @ 9:57 pm
I hope you’re right, Paul. This is certainly a damn fine directorial debut. The Scorsese comparison is a bit high though. After all, Scorsese was helping to change the direction of American film. I’d put Marc Webb’s debut along the lines of Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking as an ambitious, promising mostly successful, debut that whets the appetite for more to come.
Comment by Jason
08.02.09 @ 10:11 pm
Thanks for reading my review. Although we disagree on some points, I found your criticism to be very entertaining (especially the hipster bit). Although the film, according to you, had some series issues, I still get the feeling that you very much enjoyed it?
Comment by Franz
08.04.09 @ 8:06 pm
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