A near perfect anti-romance that deftly navigates the line between uniquely original and bizarrely inaccessible, refreshingly honest and depressingly realistic, and stylistically innovative and structurally unsound, (500) Days of Summer is a film that does not just bring to life the events in 500 days shared between one man and one woman but actually manages to paint the emotion of those 500 days on screen. As one of the trailers for (500) Days of Summer tells us, it is a story of 500 days of magic, of distance, of tenderness… 500 days of intimacy, of awkwardness, of passion… 500 days of fury, of ecstasy… of Summer. And while that is quite a list to live up to, the impressive thing about (500) Days of Summer is that it actually does.
In a nutshell, (500) Days of Summer is the story of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something greeting card writer, and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), the young woman who steals Tom’s heart the very first time they meet. But instead of telling us the story of their relationship from the day they meet until, well, the day they say goodbye forever, the film skips around from first kiss to last fight, between day (303) and day (82), and from before they start dating until long after they have stopped. Told from Tom’s point of view, the story shows us a relationship through the eyes of a man deeply in love and desperately trying to hold onto his faith in that love. From Tom’s point of view, we see events through the eyes of a man deeply in love and desperately trying to hold onto his faith in that love. But as our narrator tells us at the beginning, Summer does not believe in love, and unfortunately for Tom, that means that his story is not so much a love story as it is a story about love.
From beginning to end, the selection of days that comprise (500) of Summer are almost all an illustration of the contrast between love realized and love that will never be. In one scene, Tom and Summer roam through the domestic perfection of Ikea as the couple destined to be in love forever. In another, they sit across the table discussing their similarities to a couple whose relationship ended in a stabbing. In one scene, Summer has Tom dancing through the city a la Disney’s Enchanted. In another, she has him smashing his entire china collection on the kitchen floor. At the beginning of their relationship, the list of things Tom loves about Summer is nearly endless. When it’s on the rocks, each of those same qualities are no longer what he loves about her but what he hates. And, when all is said and done, Summer is both a woman who makes Tom believe in love more than he ever has before and causes him to lose faith in love completely.
Perhaps my favorite scene in the movie is one which actually situates both the ecstasy and the heartbreak of love right next to each other. The scene takes place after Tom and Summer have been broken up for a significant amount of time and have recently reconnected. Summer has invited Tom to a party, and as Tom walks to the door of her apartment, the screen splits—one side being his expectations for the evening and the other side being reality. As you might guess, the two sides don’t end up matching at all. And while the situation is quite similar to that which many goofball romcom suitors have found themselves in, Tom’s is not one that makes us laugh or fires off the starting pistol for him to finally make the winning play for the girl of his dreams. Instead it is an honest reminder that no matter how much we may love someone and no matter how great that love may make us feel, love is a two way street that doesn’t always work out as we would like.
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