Last night, I finally got to see "500 Days of Summer." I really hoped to see this movie before the first day of Autumn, but I live in a small town with three screens for independent films, so sometimes we have to wait. But I'm really happy to say it was worth the wait. It was really well made, great acting and writing and directing.
I think it got a lot right about being a geek and falling madly in love--from the tendency to take every little thing as a sign, to the crushing defeat of being "just friends"--but it got even more right about the way a relationship falls apart. A lot of the movie serves as a kind of autopsy for the relationship, with Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) trying to figure out where things went wrong with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and trying to figure out how he might get her back. Moments are visited and revisited, looking for the first sign of trouble, where things really ended. Depending on the context, the same moment might be an embrace between two people in love or the same couple desperately holding on to something that can't be saved.
The movie is structured out-of-order--first we see the last scene, and then we jump back to the day of the breakup, and then back to the first day Tom and Summer meet. It jumps forward and backward, eventually revealing how their relationship starts. This is really effective in a lot of scenes: in one, Tom walks to work after he sleeps with Summer for the first time, and there's a big dance number to Hall and Oates' "You Make My Dreams Come True" (at one point in this scene, Tom catches his reflection and sees Harrison Ford as Han Solo looking back at him). It jumps to a few days after the break-up, Tom going to work again, now miserable. It works really well and gives Joseph Gordon Levitt a chance to show a really wide range. At another point, Tom and Summer are in Ikea toward the end of their relationship and Tom struggles to amuse Summer, but the fact that what he's doing is a reference to an earlier date isn't revealed until the next scene.
There are a lot of really fun touches throughout--I know some reviews weren't crazy about the voice-over narration, but I liked it. It gives details that wouldn't be there otherwise, whether it's the explanation that Tom's believe in soul mates stems from "an early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie 'The Graduate'," or the details of how when Summer quoted Belle and Sebastian's "The Boy With the Arab Strap" in her high school yearbook, sales of the album in her hometown skyrocketed. I liked these details, and who else would have provided them?
I was reminded, watching this movie, of two of my favorite "romantic comedies," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Annie Hall." It makes sense--both of these movies are presented out of chronological order, and each are about, in their own way, the dissolution of a relationship and how the relationship looks when you're thinking back on it. There were a lot of scenes that were heavily reminiscent of "Annie Hall," in a good way: an awkward embrace outside of the movie theater, the meeting shortly after the breakup where the protagonist thinks there might still be a chance, and throughout, a love and awareness of the movies that influenced this one. You can almost imagine Joseph Gordon-Levitt turning to the camera and saying, "After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go. But it was great seeing Summer again. I realized what a terrific person she was, and how much fun it was just knowing her."
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