Movie Review: 500 Days of Summer

Every once in a while a movie comes along that isn’t Academy Award caliber, or have freakish special effects, but is truly enjoyable due to a fresh story and solid acting. 500 Days of Summer is that movie for me in 2009. If you have at least one romantic bone in your body, or can somehow empathize with people who do, you will enjoy 500 Days with its fresh take on the relationship. I believe most people fall into two categories, not man and woman as the film illustrates, but either wildly romantic or know someone who is one. You know the person I’m talking about, the guy or girl who has told you at least a half dozen times they’ve met “the one” to which you roll your eyes. When you ask, as you have five previous times, how they really know, they proceed to rattle off a list of bizarre similarities pointing to their destiny. That is Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in 500 Days when he finds his “soul mate” Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel).

500 Days is told by bouncing back and forth through the non-sequential days of Tom and Summer’s relationship highs and lows. The audience is duly warned at the onset of the movie that this is not a love story, and while you are given this explicit warning, something about the two characters and the story make you conveniently forget that caveat and hope they figure things out when so many have failed before them. It’s akin to watching Titanic and hoping that somehow, this time, that damned guy in the crow's nest is going to pay attention and see the mountain of an iceberg before it was too late, even though that fateful night was written nearly 100 years ago. Tom and Summer’s fate has been written as well, which was the whole premise of the movie. Is finding true love your destiny or happenstance?

Gordon-Levitt (who is twenty-eight) does the best acting job in the movie and maybe of his surprisingly long career, as he is the guy the audience must empathize with for the film to work. In some points in the movie, I truly believed he loved Summer. While Deschanel does a fine job playing the girl next door, coy with her own feelings, it’s up to Gordon-Levitt to sell the movie, which he does quite remarkably. 500 Days, as one of my friends pointed out, isn’t without its flaws. The writers have speckled clichés throughout (i.e. pouring rain during a fight…come on it doesn’t rain in LA, a mental breakdown speech at a company meeting and some other things that would spoil the plot) that at first pass may be overlooked, but nonetheless exist and detract from an otherwise “real” feeling movie. Other than those few nagging instances, I was deeply invested in the story and hung on to every scene desperate to know what was Tom and Summer’s fate (although, deep down, I already knew).

After walking away from the movie, I reflected back to when I used to walk away from law school exams. After each exam my fellow classmates and I would say whether it sucked or was “fair”, meaning the test was a hard pill to swallow, but it didn’t come out of the professor’s sick demented imagination. It was real. The message driven home in 500 Days can be simply summed up as fair and real. And, while some of the hopeless romantics might walk away distraught, most people, even though there’s bound to be some disappointment, will walk away thinking that what happened to Tom and Summer was indeed a realistically fair outcome. After all, all is fair in love and war. I give 500 Days of Summer a Spork Rating of:

Rated PG-13, 1hr 35min, Open Everywhere