Ben Saw: (500) Days of Summer

Writing about this movie, for me, is cutting to a core question of the purpose and obligation of critics; should reviewers try to strip themselves of baggage or association before sitting down to review a movie? Surely our emotional state is a huge portion of WHY we enjoy some movies in the first place; I promise you that most viewers of Panic Room felt differently about it (bored, indifferent, confused why Forest Whitaker is slumming) than someone who had just suffered a burglary. People who think they simply experience movies as brains in a jar catching the 'objective experience' are fooling themselves. It's art. It's damn-near all subjective so to talk about being baggage-free is folly. What a good reviewer can do is let the reader know that she or he was in an uncommonly strong and relevant emotional state when seeing a given movie, everything else is just self-deception.

So dear reader (theoretical though you may be), I have baggage......



(500) Days of Summer tells the story of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer's (Zooey Deschanel) relationship and its end (not a spoiler). As the title suggests, the drama unfolds from Tom's perspective so the narrative thrust becomes not so much whether Tom and Summer work out, but why they don't and how Tom reacts to it. By the end, the point is made clear: Tom has a habit of falling for women with stripper names.

Seriously though, Henry has already reviewed this movie, but we actually didn't see this one together and have succesfully avoided talking about it. He could have loved it, he could have hated it; but I'm guessing he gave it a B/B- on the grounds of finding 500 Days saccharine and, at times, tiring. This is my review though and, like I said, I walked in to this with a very different mindset than I'm guessing he did so let's just get this scene setting out of the way.

I actually saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to step back and collect my thoughts before writing this up. 500 Days resonated because I feel like I've been where these characters have been...recently in fact. The goal of the movie isn't so much to depict the story of a romance as it is to depict one young man's experience of a romance. And, what do you know?, I'm a young man and.....well....would you call it a romance? That's probably strong so, whatever you'd call my 'story about a girl', it was still in my head a bit when I walked in to the theater.

The temptation to see oneself in the various characters of a movie is always seductively solipsistic but I thought the fit between my recent experience and the two leads was uncommonly good (although not on nearly the same scale); even when I was just reading the notes about the film when it was first making the festival rounds I kind of knew I'd feel this way. At the time I read about it I may have even suggested that she and I see it when it got a commercial release, counting on the fact that the 'meet cute' parallels would jump out and we'd laugh. But still,the romantic guy pursuing the offbeat girl highly skeptical of relationships in general and love especially, the bond of music between the two, little details and poignant moments that seem way more profound when you're in the headspace of having feelings for someone than they probably are in actuality, all of this contributed to me seeing this character's story about a girl as evocative of my story about a girl.



Which is, frankly, melodramatic. My situation wasn't nearly so substantial nor did I ever have the emotional peaks and valleys that the Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character did in 500 Days. All the same, I walked in to this movie with feelings still lingering on that 'story about a girl' that wasn't to be and it was still intense enough that it mattered and recent enough that it felt fresh.

I could go on, but it's not really in keeping with the spirit of this site; you're here to read about movies, not about someone's personal life, so there you go. Enough drivel. All this is a long way of saying that I loved 500 Days and its double shot of bittersweet sentimentality was as as satisfying a catharsis as I could hope for movies to provide.

That's not to say that it's a movie for everyone. It's one of these limited audience indie movies that indulges in flights in to fantasy, is packed to the gills with hip musical references (I lost count) and also intent on finding romance in quirk (love in Ikea, elaborate drawings on arms, etc). If you found Juno irritating, 500 Days will also rankle at times but the latter is more sparing with its affectations and uses them to greater dramatic effect when it does indulge. The most obvious indulgence is that the movie skips around in time, going from late in Tom's infatuation with Summer to its very beginning to somewhere in the middle to back to the beginning and so on. True, the script and acting are good enough that the story could be told in straight time, but the patchwork chronology serves to emphasize Tom's emotional journey over what winds up happening with Summer. There are touches that go from cute to perhaps too cute (the sister, some animated moments, visual tips of the hat to Magritte, the flipping back and forth between days (and the accompanying illustrations)) and I could see someone not in tune with the movie finding these touches genuinely irritating whereas, for the most part, I was willing to overlook them when I wasn't genuinely charmed.



From a technical perspective, there are a few odd facets: heavy-handed product placement (the aforementioned Ikea being one of many), music that can be distractingly on the nose and a cinematographer that seemed to be shooting around Deschanel's stomach as if she was pregnant (especially noticeable in the last scene although I can find precisely zero confirmation of this). All of this paints a picture of a movie trying too hard which is not entirely unfair.

The script does have a few real flaws, the biggest of which is Tom's final office scene. It's a climactic speech that I found hard to watch. Although I read it as representing Tom's self-absorbed, immature attitude towards Summer and their failed relationship, it was still bratty in a way that I found unwelcome given the wry way the rest of the movie treats Tom's more extreme forays in to self-pity. Secondly, I never totally get Summer's appeal to Tom (this is mitigated somewhat by my soft spot for Zooey herself) but I would argue that that's kind of irrelevant: we didn't have to feel the way he did about THIS girl, because we've all been in that same place with SOME girl.

"Or guy", you might say. Well, no. I'm focusing on the guy experience here because that's what I found most refreshing about 500 Days: it flips some common romantic stereotypes on their head by focusing on the woman that doesn't want commitment and the man that eagerly seeks it. It's a role reversal compared to what movies usually feed us and a character arc that is seldom explored in cinema (at least from the male perspective). In that very limited sense of displaying male sadness and vulnerability I immediately thought of Brokeback Mountain which is my recent gold standard for that kind of emotional exploration. The script is smart, witty and lively, the creative flourishes are winning and often funny, and the two principals are terrific at bringing their push-pull to life. I have admired Gordon-Levitt's work since Brick (as opposed to Angels in the Outfield, I suppose) and, in a fairly weak year for Oscar-worthy performances so far, I wouldn't mind if Gordon-Levitt (the total standout in a solid cast) got a nomination. He shows tremendous emotional range and succeeds in grounding a periodically absurd role.



It his performance that allows the movie to successfully end on a mature note: love can be real and good relationships are worth pursuing but just because we're all the main characters in our own narrative doesn't mean that every budding romance we leap at has to play out happily nor does it mean that someone working against the protagonist's (re: our) goals is a bad guy. This is not melodrama. Yes, Summer does some bad things but Tom can be out of line as well, pushing Summer in personal directions she has clearly said she doesn't want to be pushed. More importantly, Tom fails to understand an ineffable aspect of romance that the movie ends on beautifully: just because he feels a special connection to Summer doesn't mean that she is obligated to reciprocate and, romantically-speaking, she doesn't. Deeply felt affection, in real life, does not necessitate mutuality.

I was never in a position like Tom where I had the same deep, unrequited feelings, but the imbalance of affections and goals are not altogether incomparable and that's why I'm a little worried that my (almost) unmitigated enjoyment of the movie came from the baggage I brought in with me. But this is the most honest review I can give today. I'd like to think that I'm intellectually honest enough to report back if I ultimately rated the move more as catharsis than craft but that's hard to take entirely seriously, so let's reduce my take down to the essentials: 500 Days is the second movie of the year I strongly want to see again and a movie I fully intend to own when it comes out on DVD. It's one of the few movies this year where I've found myself replaying scenes in my head when I found them particularly effective and I'm confident that down the line I'll still remember the initial emotional attachment I placed on 500 Days even though the attachment itself inevitably fades with time. Pretty good for a self-involved little indie flick.

.......even still, I should probably see it again, shouldn't I?

Grade: A (for now)