500 Days of Summer

Thumbing its nose to the worst conventions of romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer is a refreshing, thoughtful contemplation on the mysteries of the heart.

Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is a bored greeting card composer, aspiring architect and hopeless romantic.  When the doe-eyed, retro-cool Summer (Zooey Deschanel) starts work at the office, he falls hard, and a courtship soon blossoms out of a shared love of The Smiths.

When a film references the melancholy Mancunians you know this ain’t going to be your average Cameron Diaz / Ashton Kutcher rom-com, i.e.: 'meet-cute/quarrel/consummation/credits'...  

Director Mark Webb has long track record in music videos so it’s appropriate that his first feature has all the elements of a great mix tape. There’s an overwhelming familiarity to it – most people have likely dated a Tom or a Summer – but with inventive execution and well-rounded characters, it takes you to the unexpected. 

A clever narrative device charts the progress of Tom and Summer’s doomed relationship through a curated selection of their 500 days together.  We dart back and forth from the giddying happiness of first love, to the stony silence of the days leading up to the split, and back again, to the nervous tension of the first date. The fractured timeline works a treat; who ever scrutinised the details of a failed relationship in chronological order? 

In one standout sequence Tom and Summer role-play as happy homemakers at that epicentre of domesticity, Ikea. In a neat subversion of the Swedish design house’s one-way shopping policy, a split-screen offers dual outcomes that show Tom’s expectations taking a U-turn from reality.

500 Days will draw inevitable comparisons to Annie Hall, in its attempt to deconstruct a love grown cold. But you know what? It holds up, mostly on the strength and integrity of its lead performances.   Gordon-Levitt has been honing his craft for years in small indie standouts like Mysterious Skin and Brick, and his likeable, vulnerable Tom is bound to widen his fan base tenfold. So too Deschanel;  the darling  of the indie-set is a natural fit for the headstrong Summer. Though she’s a creature of Tom’s recollection, she’s a fully-drawn woman of substance who is upfront from the outset that she’s no ‘happily ever after’ kind of gal.

A pivotal scene involves Tom – well into the triple-digit days of the break-up – lambasting his greeting card colleagues for peddling untruths about love, and he quits in disgust at his role in perpetuating the myths. Sure, it’s a comical look at the impact of a break-up on a tragic romantic, but it’s not a stretch to see the scene as a distinct Up Yours to Nora Ephron, Richard Curtis and their cronies, for promising that everyone gets their happy ending (even Seattle-based insomniacs and foppish WASPs).

500 Days of Summer may not entirely break the rom-com mould (the quirky friends and drunk karaoke still get a look-in), but it brings a level of depth and believability to the genre that’s been AWOL for too long.