(500) Days of Summer
Life is lived continuously, but relived anecdotally. We tell our own stories to others, and they tell us theirs. War stories, embarrassments, stories about grief, loss, college, “that time when….” These stories aren’t our entire lives, and some of them may not have affected us greatly in one way or another, but they remain in our memories, as a kind of parenthetical gesture of who we once were, what we once did, who we once knew. Some of them are positive, and some of them are negative. It isn’t inherently good or bad to remember more good or more bad. But, to live realistically, to remember realistically, sometimes we need to remember both as honestly as we can.
The tag line is “This is not a love story. This is a story about love.” It’s pithy, and it says so much about this film, as tag lines so often fail to do. We follow Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he (and we) fall in love with Summer (Zooey Deschanel). They work in the same office (for a while), and then they don’t. They see each other, and then they don’t. He falls in love with her, and then she…don’t. The story is seen from the eyes of Tom, from the mind’s eye of Tom, as he retells the story of Summer, the good times and the bad. He remembers all the things he wants to and little of what he doesn’t. Then the other way round. He receives advice from his adolescent sister. In short, he goes through all the universal struggles of romance, trying to label without labeling, to love without saying love.
Summer slips through his fingers. We know this fifteen minutes into the movie. What we don’t know is if he’ll get her back, how he’ll do that, and what this movie has to offer in the way of unconventional approaches to the vast human commentary on love. It’s unconventional in several very effective and affecting ways. The fourth wall dissolves as we hear directly from three of the characters; verisimilitude disappears as live-action mixes with animation and a scene that seems pulled straight from a musical; chronology fades as each anecdote from Tom’s memory jumps hours, weeks, even months into the future and back to the past; and genre dwindles in the effulgence of a genuinely gripping story about love.
Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel have a musical chemistry, a rapport that goes beyond understanding to a kind of trust that only lovers know. Marc Webb directs with the confidence of an experienced auteur, but without the trappings of habit. The supporting cast is wonderful, giving the movie icing on an already mouthwatering cake. This is a movie about the questions we ask of destiny, the ambivalent hands of the Fates, and that evasive legend called love. This is a movie about “love, not Santa Claus.” It’s one you should see as soon as you can run to the theatre, money in hand, ready to be floored, or melted, or astonished, or something else that’s genuine, true, authentic, human. Fall in love with Summer all over again.
Rating: 4/4 Stars
