Fall in Love with a Non-Love Story

Sometimes it’s harder to review a film you truly love, because the points you want to hit on in explaining why it’s so good can be overwhelming. 500 Days of Summer is refreshingly and surprisingly perfect. It is completely different from any “romantic comedy” you have ever seen. Take a real-life story, and make it more real-life by chopping it up and mixing up its chronological sequence, adding glimpses into our minds with surreal, emotion-driven mirages, and play it against an infectious soundtrack.

There are two major dynamics going here that make the film, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as the couple in question, startlingly realistic. One is the relationship itself. You know from the trailer that this does not end well. Boy does not get girl. So get that out of your head, and watch a relationship unfold on screen that you can totally relate to. The romcom relationship is so unrealistic, and it boosts our expectations up to unfulfillable standards. No, sorry, probably no one will ever ride a horse across a lake for you. 500 Days is a relationship we have all had. Whether we’re in a relationship now or single, this has happened. It’s brutally honest. We all have fallen so in love we think it’s the end all, be all, but then it does just that: it ends. Like a slap in the face. It’s over. And we have to move on.

The second dynamic is the order in which we see this relationship. We don’t see it from day 1 to day 500. It jumps around. And this was a brilliant tactic in writing, because it perfectly depicted a relationship in retrospect. When you’re in a relationship, you can’t take yourself out of it to look in and analyze. You just go forward, day to day, and everything seems great until it doesn’t, and it ends. And you think, where did it go wrong? But by looking back, we see it out of order, and we see that one day we were so happy, the next miserable, the next happy, the next miserable, and so on. The relationship’s course makes sense when it’s viewed out of order.

Aside from these two major writing decisions (made by writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber), there were tons of treasures in this film. And I can’t say enough about the writing anyway. I mean, they nailed the inside of a young guy and a young girl’s minds. Dead on reality in emotion, love, and just everyday thoughts. And that picture was painted sublimely by Levitt and Deschanel, who were completely believable as a couple and as typical urban twentysomethings, defined by the urge to find something, anything, that completes them. There’s just so much to love here, so much to relate to…just get to movie theaters now. You’ll love watching people screw up love.

August 5th, 2009 by Courtney Iseman | Posted in Reviews | (0)