Movie review: (500) Days of Summer
(500) Days of Summer
3 stars
Directed by Marc Webb
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend
By Mina Hochberg
In “(500) Days of Summer,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a hopeless romantic named Tom. He’s such a romantic, in fact, that he’s the star copywriter at a greeting card company. Go figure. At his job, he falls hard for the new secretary, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who happens to be a staunch disbeliever in the notion of love. Despite their battling philosophies on romance, they hit it off, bonding over music, common propensities for public goofiness and all the other unseen forces that bring lovers together. After a year, though, Summer calls it quits, breaking Tom’s heart.
“(500) Days” reviews their relationship from beginning to end. A la “Memento,” though, it does so out of order, hopscotching back and forth among the landmark days of their romance: the day they met, the days they fought, the day Tom realized he was in love. The movie simulates the rewind/fast forward process taking place in the jilted Tom’s head as he pines away and tries to figure out what went wrong.
Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are attractive people, and the fact that they’re realistically attractive — as opposed to airbrushed, Hollywood attractive — goes a long way in making their characters sympathetic. And yet, you never feel that close to them. Somewhere in the midst of all this day-hopping, their characters start to stagnate and the time-travel starts to wear on the viewer. When you finally hop to Day 500 and learn the verdict on their relationship, the impact is a bit underwhelming. It vaguely moves you, but you don’t feel invested enough to cheer or weep.
Then again, the point probably isn’t to make you cheer or weep. The point, rather, is to capture the fickleness of relationships. Whatever the case may be, the journey is worthwhile. Though it occasionally veers into cliches, the writing is refreshingly genuine and offers a winning balance of earnest and whimsical.
