Film review: 500 Days of Summer
by Scott R. Garceau, The Philippine Star | 10/30/2009 4:13 PM
Printer-friendly version | 
Send to friend | 
Share your views
MANILA - Since the success of Sundance Festival hits like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Juno", everybody's looking for the next Easy-Bake indie hit.
The usual ingredients include sassy or ironic dialogue and characters, copious references to '80s music and TV, J.D. Salinger allusions, and a few heaping tablespoons of quirk.
But "500 Days of Summer" has few other things going on for it besides references to "Catcher in the Rye" and cool playlists.
It has a couple of hip, young actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoeey Deschanel -- hey, even her name is a Salinger reference!) going against their darker indie inclinations to serve up a romantic comedy for the iPod playlist generation.
"500 Days of Summer" gives us Tom (Levitt), a would-be architect who writes greeting cards, and Summer (Deschanel), the secretary of Tom's boss.
Both are into retro-hip clothing. Tom dresses like Mr. Rogers, in tie and sweater vests, while headphones (naturally) wrapped around his neck most of the time.
Summer wears '60s "It" girl bangs and '50s skirts and looks like a groovy June Cleaber or a hipster waitress.
But their charm nearly lifts the kookly indulgences of the Scott Neustadter/Michael Weber script beyond mere rom-com targets.
Summer is loose and breezy, and Tom is immediately smitten. But he finds out during the company's "karaoke night" that she doesn't want a boyfriend.
Indeed, she doesn't believe in love, declaring it "a fantasy." Tom's drunken friend announces: "Oh, my God... you're a dude!"
Role reversal and other quirks
That leaves Tom in the "Nancy" role for the duration of this "Sid and Nancy" relationship.
Movie set photos indicate there probably was an homage to that '80s doomed romance between punk rock star Sid Vicious and his blonde bombshell girlfriend Nancy Spungen, planned in the original script.
With her wide eyes and retro look, Deschanel has become an indie queen, and she's certainly great at projecting deadpan reactions and spaciness (though let's face it: she's no Parker Posey).
Despite her claims about love, she kisses Tom in the copier room (where else?) and proceeds to engage in a non-relationship with Tom that includes movies, sex, pancake breakfasts and shopping for Ringo Starr albums.
Tom is perplexed, but the architectural graduate who writes banal greeting cards goes along for the ride.
The script is "non-linear" (a favorite indie cinema term), starting with the aftermath of their breakup and working its way back and forth along the relationship timeline.
Still, most of director Marc Webb's quirky flourishes pay off, such as the split-screen "Expectations / Reality" segment and the Big Dance Musical sequence set to Hall and Oate's "You Make My Dreams Come True."
If the scene doesn't immediately make you gag, it will kind of remind you of those old Dr. Pepper TV ads.
What doesn't work as well is the existence of a younger sister who gives relationship advice to Tom on a soccer field -- shades of Phoebe Caulfield, but with a potty mouth.
Also high on the "big no-no" list is the narration, which works for "Magnolia" or "The Opposite of Sex", but is completely unnecessary here. The voiceover's main function is to tell us, "straight out of the gate, this is not a love story."
Still, there's a love lesson
Towards the end of the movie, we find out if Mr. Voiceover is indeed telling the truth, and if "500 Days of Summer" has the balls to avoid the reconciliation path taken by 9 out of 10 Hollywood rom-coms.
Gordon-Levitt here might seem a little out of his field, playing a nebbishly romantic hero (hello, Dustin!).
The former "3rd Rock From The Sun" TV star has gained serious credibility in edgier fare such as "Mysterious Skin" and "Brick."
But he manages to pull it off, going for, as my wife explained it, what "edgy" actor Ryan Gosling was apparently in "The Notebook" (i.e. big box office appeal).
What puzzled us throughout "500 Days of Summer", especially since Tom was such an open book, was: What is Summer's deal, exactly? She's strangely enigmatic, yet the "she's a dude" explanation doesn't really explain her motivation.
She apparently is capable of blithely using Tom as an F.B. until "Mr. Right" comes along, but such a conclusion would surely lead to 1,000 Days of Bitterness, not the uplifting ending the romantic comedy genre requires.
Some clues to her true nature come from the director, who notes in his press kit: "We all know Summer because Summer isn't just a girl, she's an event."
When the director broke up with his "Summer", he explained: "I couldn't shake that feeling that something had gone horribly, painfully wrong with the universe." The film nails that feeling pretty well.
We never get the sense that Tom's pain will ever lead to the end of the world or anything nearly as drastic. And there are certainly no "Sid and Nancy" moments.
But when you peel back all the quirky directional touches and stylistic excesses, perhaps the lesson of heartbreak - however brief - is the true gift of "500 Days of Summer." Report by Scott R. Garceau, The Philippine Star. Photos from the Internet Movie Database.
Comments