(500) Days of Summer

Sunday, January 10th, 2010, 9:45 pm

There are some movies that, if you know me at all, you know I'm going to love. (500) Days of Summer probably falls into that category. It's not as unconventional as some of the reviews made it seem -- yes, we jump around in time, but we still proceed more or less chronologically. In a movie that talks much more about the way we perceive love and life and relationships than about the actual truth (or lack thereof) of those ideas, the time-jumping was an elegant wrapper for the film rather than some ultra-clever device or new form of storytelling.

Don't take that as a criticism, though. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the screenwriters, conceived of the perfect structure for telling this kind of story. The key, though, is that the story is what you come away with, not the structure -- in short, it's not a gimmick.

That story is pretty easy to synopsize: Tom meets Summer (Day 1) and their "relationship" goes up and down and finally comes to a full conclusion on Day 500. I put "relationship" in quotes because a major feature of their disconnect is their different ideas about the nature of relationships, labels, and so forth. Of course, their actual relationship ends long before Day 500, because this movie is about Tom, not about Tom&Summer -- Day 500 is the day Tom is finally fully reconciled.

The movie doesn't really take a "let's blow up these ideas about love" approach -- in fact, the ending, the way Tom resolves himself to the end of Summer, is fully in tune with Hollywood and greeting-card notions of love. (Tom, of course, is a greeting-card writer, having declined to chase his dreams of being an architect. I told you it was pretty conventional in some ways.) But the way we get there is so pitch-perfect, so heartbreaking and funny, that you can simply appreciate a well-told story about compelling (yet just blank enough to project ourselves into) characters. The easy comparison is to Up in the Air -- another conventional (when looked at on the level of the outline of the story) love story (although (500) Days, in a Magritte-ian touch, explicitly states, before the film really begins, that it is not a love story) that rises above the usual schlock through simple masterful storytelling.

That isn't really fair to (500) Days's cleverer bits, though, including a hilarious scene of European film parodies, a beautifully done split-screen of "Expectations" vs. "Reality" at a party that Summer throws and Tom attends, and a dance number in a park.

I would be remiss, as well, if I didn't mention the Los Angeles that the movie takes place in. L.A., for whatever reason, tends not to come off well on the movies and in TV. This always strikes me as backwards, given that everyone in the industry lives there, but maybe it's some kind of residual resentment over being forced to move to pursue their careers in L.A. rather than any actual animosity for the place itself. Regardless of why, though, New York stories (like Nick and Norah, even though the teens there lived in New Jersey), Chicago stories (The Time Traveler's Wife comes to mind), and stories from almost every other place romanticize those places. While you can question the decision to locate this story in downtown L.A., where people can walk to the grocery and to work and can take the subway hither and yon, on the grounds that it's not a great percentage of the population that lives there, the city was undoubtedly sketched with tenderness. The L.A. of (500) Days is an L.A. I'd want to live in; it's an L.A. anyone would want to live in. The tone set by the place was crucial to the story, and I thought the filmmakers created a place that fit the story very well.

I hate to spoil the mood I've tried to create with this post with the tawdry details of a revised 2009 Top Ten, but here it is anyway. This time, I'm ranking. (Everyone else does.)

1. District 9
2. Up
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
4. Sugar
5. (500) Days of Summer
6. An Education
7. Up in the Air
8. Inglorious Basterds
9. The Hangover
10. Julie & Julia

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