(500) DAYS OF SUMMER – marc webb – 5.5 / 10

Though it deserves some credit for being one of the funnier romantic comedies out there (although that really isn’t saying all that much) and for telling its story in an appealingly unconventional way, (500) Days of Summer ultimately fails because the relationship at the center of the film just isn’t worth rooting for. Perhaps this owes to the fact that well over half the film is spent either with the central couple already broken up or in the initial throes of their infatuation. And while it might be true that those are the moments a person is most likely to focus on after the relationship has ended, in the film it means that there’s an awful lot of cute banter and agonized heartbreak but precious little evidence that these two people worked well as a couple and deserve the audience’s rooting interest.

Much of the blame for that can be attributed to the fact that Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is a bit of a cipher. After ninety plus minutes of watching Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) obsess over her, the audience still has no idea who she really is. She likes The Smiths, wears quirky clothes, doesn’t particularly believe in love and is prone to all sorts of random behavior (sprinting through Ikea or shouting ‘penis’ at the top of her lungs in a crowded park, for instance). But she has no family, no friends, no ambition to speak of and seemingly no life outside of the moments she spends with Tom. She’s the type of character who only exists in movies (and maybe in the mind of a certain type of twenty-something writer) precisely because there’s nothing to her. She’s a fantasy, all surface and no substance.

If the film had bothered to delve into Summer’s character a little bit more, it might have been an interesting investigation into why this sort of relationship always ends in disaster; namely that the person we think we want to be with almost always turns out to be quite different from the type of person that can really make us happy. Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem to be as smitten with Summer as Tom is. They have no interest in fleshing her out into a real person, confident in the belief that the audience will be as in love with her as they are.

Maybe it’s because Zooey Deschanel has played this role countless times before (in everything from All the Real Girls to Elf to Yes Man) or maybe it’s because I’m a little too old to find that sort of flighty superficiality appealing, but I often found myself wondering what’s so great about this girl that Tom thinks his life is going to end if he can’t be with her. She’s cute and fun and all but she’s really not worth the complete meltdown that Tom suffers after they break up.

But for a certain type of guy at a certain time in his life, a girl like this is pretty much catnip. She likes the music he likes, is (seemingly) completely unself-conscious and spontaneous, sports a cute retro haircut, is just the slightest bit damaged, etc. In short, she fits almost exactly the blueprint this type of guy would draw up if he was designing his perfect girl. ‘She’s better than the girl of my dreams,’ Tom says at one point. But since even children know that a fantasy is, by definition, unattainable, there’s no reason to care about the fact that Summer and Tom’s relationship implodes. She even tells him flat out when they first get together that she isn’t looking for anything serious. So the guy has no one to blame but himself for his heartbreak. And I just don’t see how anyone can muster up even the slightest bit of empathy for a character who gets exactly what he should have known was coming and then spends days and weeks on end completely falling to pieces because of it.

Which is the film’s other major flaw: that Tom spends countless days wallowing in self-pity. We get it, man, having your heart broken sucks. But of the 500 days chronicled in the film, it seems that more than half of them involve Tom either drinking himself into a stupor, failing to show up for work or to do his job because he’s sad or talking some poor bystander’s ear off about how great Summer was. I just wanted someone to tell him to stop being such a little bitch and grow up already. Or just to slap him really really hard.

Eventually, of course, Tom does pull himself back together. He quits his shitty job writing greeting cards (with a big speech about how the whole industry is bullshit, which, for some reason, the film seems to believe is tremendously insightful), gets a job as an architect (what he really wanted to do before getting sidetracked into the greeting card gig) and meets cute a new girl that promises to fulfill all his (now more realistic) fantasies. So, you see, it was all worth it in the end. He may not have ended up with the girl he thought was The One but his life is that much better for it. Hooray.

Bullshit. Worse, it’s just as much bullshit as any big budget Hollywood romantic comedy you’d care to name. (500) Days of Summer (and no, the film doesn’t offer an explanation as to what the parentheses are doing in the title) is a smug, self-satisfied film made by filmmakers who seem to think they deserve some sort of special consideration because they’ve noticed how hollow and ridiculous the Hollywood romantic comedy is. Big fucking deal. Even the people who watch those movies know they’re absurd. (500) Days of Summer might declare itself to be the antidote to that sort of film but it ends up in more or less the exact same place. It just takes a different route to get there. And while that route is occasionally amusing, it certainly doesn’t elevate the film out of the rom-com ghetto.