500 Days of Summer (2009)

In (500) Days of Summer, Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a 20-something greeting card writer who has only two passions: architecture and love. Although he has tabled his architectural dreams, when the beautiful Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) walks into his office, Tom is certain that he’s found the destined love of his life. It’s a fact that’s confirmed for him by their Smiths-centered elevator "meet-cute" and shared affection for the Knight Rider theme song.

But, as the title implies and as the omniscient narrator warns the audience at the outset, this is not one of those happily-ever-after love stories. In fact, 500 days–or just about a year and a half–is precisely how long Summer lasts. Based on the witty script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, these days are presented out of order, flipping back and forth between the early nervous days of Tom’s trying to strike up a conversation; the bitterly bleak days of Tom’s refusing to get over Summer; and the brilliant, love-soaked days in Ikea that happen between.

This bounding around out of time not only captures the spirit of modern love — where all too often it can unravel so fast, it’s hard to tell beginning from end — it also demonstrates director Marc Webb’s spry, playful approach to what could have been ponderous, hipsterish tripe. Webb gives us a film that’s like each romantic comedy you’ve seen and yet utterly original by throwing in every romance filmmaking convention in the book.

Hilarious, spontaneous dance break in the park scored by Hall & Oates’ "You Make My Dreams"? Check. Split screen contrasting Tom’s idealized vision of a hoped-for reconciliation against the decidedly less glorious reality? Check. The best (and possibly only) use of Patrick Swayze’s "She’s Like the Wind" since Dirty Dancing? Checkmate.

With that much (and more!) going on, it’s impressive that the film still seems uncontrived, with one notable exception: It’s clear that the third-person voiceover narration is an attempt to continue the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to telling this love story — just one more of those cutesy devices that simply defies real-life love — but it either needed to happen more often or not at all. As it is, it comes off as too self-consciously ironic.

Thankfully, the terrific acting throughout is able to overcome this minor misstep and make the whole film hang together. Gordon-Levitt, whom you may remember from his role as an elderly alien trapped in a teenager’s body on TV’s Third Rock from the Sun, has grown into his expressive eyes and eerily deep voice superbly. His portrayal of Tom articulates every smitten, jealous, furious, baffled, heartbroken, ridiculous love pang to near-perfection.

Meanwhile, Deschanel’s Summer is actually charming and likeable enough — in spite of her being as capricious as the season for which she’s named — to make the audience start to root for these crazy kids to work things out. It’s a feat rarely accomplished in this kind of offbeat romantic comedy, where being "real" gets translated as being really annoying. (I still haven’t figured what was so special about Ethan Hawke’s character in Reality Bites, for example.)

In a sense, (500) Days of Summer is the logical evolution from Reality Bites, which was in its own time the evolution from Annie Hall. In all of the above, falling in and out of love is never as perfect as its heroes/heroines imagined it beforehand or remember it afterwards. But they each remind us that it’s worth doing every time.