movie review: (500) Days of Summer

As I write this, (500) Days of Summer is my favorite movie; most recent in a list that includes Shaun of the Dead, Fight Club and Jurassic Park. The concept is a fairly simple one: keen and sensitive boy meets aloof, gorgeous girl. The boy, Tom (played by an impeccably-dressed Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is our modern age's quintessential romantic. Raised on post-punk and a firm belief in love as life's ultimate goal, he is both successful and outcast. He has a job that, while ultimately is not his passion (architecture), provides him a little creative outlet and the means to walk the streets of Los Angeles in an incredible wardrobe of sweater vests and suit coats with an iPod to provide a soundtrack to his optimistic existence. His grounded life maintains the capacity to be completely turned on its side when Summer (the wide-eyed Zooey Deschanel) finally walks into it. The mindset he enters once they begin their nervous romance, however, seems founded on the belief that it was meant to happen all along. While she pleads with him from the outset that she is not looking for commitment, Summer toys with his emotions at every turn, revealing to him secrets that she has never before shared and trekking through the rain to his apartment to reconcile after a multi-layered argument. To Tom, this segment of his life removes him from everything he has known before and blinds him from any potential future that is not the two of them growing old at each other's side.

Tom lives and breathes in the subtleties of every moment they spend together. Each unrequited show of affection starves his dedicated heart while the rare instances of shared compassion are unduly feasted upon. In his lovesick state, he is too overcome to see their differences as reasons why they are not meant to be together, and as an audience we are absorbed into sharing his blind faith. Instead of giving in to their incompatibility, the incredible joys of how it was falling in love stay with him as benchmarks for how every moment together could and should be. What he fails to see as Summer tiptoes through their relationship is that her foresight does not cover the same territory as his.

This is a movie about how love is blind. The first time I watched it I applauded its tribute to romanticism. Last week I decided to buy the DVD and intended it to be a kind of comfort film to fall asleep to every night, basking in the lessons it teaches. After watching it for a second time, I focused more on the perspective of Summer and realized how short-lived their romance was. True, it is a huge step in her emotional maturation, as she gives more of herself to Tom than she had to anyone before. You can imagine the way she talks about him to the man she marries at the end of the film. "Oh, he was just this guy at my work that I dated for a while." A statement innocent in it's delivery, but shrouded in deeper meaning. In her mind you know that she was affected by his love, but in order to maintain her character she can never openly admit its importance, even to Tom himself. Notice how close she comes to crying as she walks away after their conversation on the bench at the end of the movie. A similar question of their relationship's significance to Tom might elicit about five minutes of "um"s and "well"s as his brain and heart fight over how to justify his very real emotional longing. By the end of the film, however, we see that Tom may be able to look back on their time together, as his little sister suggests, with an eye aware of their incompatibility and respectful of the importance their time together will always have on both of their lives.

On a personal note, I have never related to a movie character as well as Tom. From his great taste in clothes to his steadfast belief in love as the meaning of life. This movie provides a realistic look at the joys and sorrows of that existence. From the fantastic post-coital celebration scene to his depressed trip to the liquor store for orange juice, whiskey and twinkies. I will never be able to listen to "Train in Vain" without thinking of Gordon-Levitt's slurred karaoke version. The simple motion graphics provide an excellent aesthetic touch and the soundtrack compliments Tom's obvious affinity for music. This movie is the perfect love story for romantics of the twenty-first century; holding tightly to dreams of storybook romance, whether they will ever be actualized or not.