500 Days of Summer - movie review

The sardonic narrator of (500) Days of Summer warns us early on, as if not to get our hopes up, that this is not a love story… but that it is a story about love. That’s just a little bit of semantic trickery of course. (500) Days of Summer is a love story – in truth a better love story than most, since it captures love in all its beautiful contradictions.

It is a peculiarly told love story though, which treats time a bit like a skipping record. The needle drops first not on Day 1 – the day Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets his boss’s new assistant Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and falls for her instantly – but Day 488, a scene on a park bench which looks rather like the end of Tom and Summer’s relationship.

The film continues in this vein, sliding backwards and forwards in the 500-day history of what appears to be a doomed love affair, as we try to work out, along with Tom: what went wrong? This is a romance in retrospect: sliced and diced, sweet, sour, bitter. But these are Tom’s subjective memories, and one’s memory can play tricks.

(500) Days of Summer is a bit like a fun-lovin’ version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and, like Michel Gondry, director Marc Webb cut his teeth making music videos. He draws on this sensibility here in a big way. There is of course the obligatory trendy indie soundtrack (comprised, naturally, not of love songs, but of ‘songs about love’), the now-compulsory Zooey Deschanel singing scene (see Elf, Yes Man, Raving), and gentle hints provided on band T-shirts and vinyl covers (‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘Wake Up And Smell The Roses’, etc).

But there’s also Webb’s quirky visual style, which has the heightened reality of an actual musical. It flits from song-and-dance numbers to parodies of French new wave cinema, from vox pops to clever split-screen sequences. We’ve seen this kind of intentional wackiness before, but none of it is just for kicks in (500) Days – it’s all part of the storytelling

For a movie so splendidly self-aware, the choice of Deschanel is somewhat less brave though. It’s something to do with those dish-sized blue doe eyes that Deschanel is always cast as the ‘free spirit’ (it’s just the details that are different: listening to Simon and Garfunkel; jogging photography; hitching across the galaxy), and she’s fairly underwhelming here. But then again, (500) Days makes no apologies for not creating a rounded character out of Summer – it’s Tom’s feelings for her that are important, and Gordon-Levitt is the kind of guy you enjoy riding the highs and lows with. Clearly in a bid to escape his sitcom roots, he’s done his time in dark, broody films – he and Deschanel both previously starred in Manic, a very different film indeed – and it’s great to see him returning to something of this flavour, which has laughs from start to finish.

(500) Days of Summer presents the perfect analogy for itself: a greeting card copy writer experiencing real love. It’s a hearty and heartfelt dose of something real and wonderful amongst phony emotions and conveyor belt sap we’ve come to expect from the rom-com genre, with a little bit of cinematic magic to capture that most magical of subjects.