I wanted to like (500) Days of Summer. I really did. It has gotten some very good reviews, is already ranked by IMDb voters as one of the Top 250 movies of all time, and boasts one of the most alluring trailers of the year.
And yeah, the movie has some fantastic moments, but ultimately, those high points only underscore the problems. They suggest all the opportunities that the immature screenwriters have missed.
Spoilers ahead!
But let me back up: In case you haven’t heard about it, (500) Days of Summer is a highly stylized romantic comedy about a greeting card writer named Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his failed relationship with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), an office assistant at his company. It’s the kind of movie that introduces Summer’s quirky beauty in a black-and-white flashback that’s designed to look like something from the 1950s. We see young Summer quote the band Belle and Sebastian in her high school yearbook, and then we cut to a group of music industry executives, all dressed in ridicously fancy suits, puzzling over the sudden surge of Belle and Sebastian album sales in Summer’s hometown. You see, she’s just that beautiful: So beautiful that she can make people buy The Boy With the Arab Strap.
To his credit, first-time director Marc Webb understands whimsy. The film is beautifully composed, and it slides so subtly into magic that it takes a minute to realize we’ve left reality. When Tom learns some bad news about Summer, he walks slowly down the street, as anybody would. But then the color drains out of the frame, until he’s standing in a sea of pencil drawings. And then Tom himself gets replaced by an ink silhouette. It’s gorgeous.
But what do images like that serve? Mostly, they serve writers who are in love with their own feelings… who seem to have decided their pain is so special and so important that it merits an entire movie.
In other words, we get a script, from novice authors Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, that gives grand treatment to shallow emotions.
Case in point: When Tom decides to quit his job at the greeting card company, he makes a speech about how greeting cards just manufacture fake emotion, then he storms out.
But the thing is, the movie has already demonstrated that greeting cards can give people access to real feelings they can’t otherwise express. There’s a montage of Tom, in the throes of his honeymoon phase with Summer, cranking out valuable card after valuable card. Obviously, then, when he storms out later, his argument is full of holes.
But the script treats Tom’s fiery speech like it’s gospel. It even heightens his language—making him far more eloquent than usual—to underscore how “wise” he is.
To me, that says the writers didn’t bother exploring the implications of the scene. They were content with the cheap conclusion that when a dude takes a stand, he’s totally righteous.
They’re even less thoughtful in their treatment of Summer. For starters, the movie begins with a disclaimer that all the characters are fictional, and that any similarity to real people is a coincidence. Then a title card pops up saying the writers especially don’t mean to reference a specific woman (whose name I forget.) Then a third title card appears that says “Bitch.”
So… the writers are telling us this movie is a slap in the face to some chick who hurt them. (Or at least hurt one of them.) Could they make it any clearer that they’re going to be selfish? Or that they’re less interested in examining all the facets of a relationship than in glorifying their own wounded feelings?
And sure enough, Summer is an archetype. She impossibly alluring, but she’s uncommunicative, never explaining what’s on her mind. She’s a mystery to be sighed over, not a person to be known.
I’m not saying it’s a problem to tell a story from one character’s perspective, but there are ways to focus on a single person without reducing everyone else to a cliche. Take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: That movie is about Joel and his perspective on Clementine, but it still lets Clementine express herself. If Neustadter and Weber had bothered to give Summer more to say, then the world around Tom would feel more honest. Tom himself would feel more real.
Okay… I could go on, but I feel like that’s a good opening salvo. Let’s keep the conversation going about this movie. What did you guys think? What haven’t I mentioned?
8 responses so far ↓
1 Kristi Detch-Koehl // Aug 3, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Hello, my dear friend. I totally disagree with your interpretation of Tom’s “greeting card/storm out” speech. I totally took it as a take-off on the cliche boardroom speech, where the board erupts into applause and the speechifier is vindicated. Not the case here. Tom is having a complete breakdown, and his one friend only applauds because the moment is so awkward, not because the filmmakers meant for it to be a triumphant moment for Tom. I think the moment reads as a holy-crap-this-guy-is-going-down-the-toilet beat, and the audience is left feeling for his co-workers, not for Tom.
2 Linda // Aug 3, 2009 at 4:13 pm
See, I saw it as basically the opposite. I thought the title card at the beginning was obviously a joke — the movie is about a broken relationship; I thought they were just acknowledging that we all have old wounds, not actually telegraphing that they were ACTUALLY axe-grinding.
And I didn’t sympathize with Tom during the greeting-card speech, nor think I was supposed to. I thought it was the intent of that scene to underscore that he had slipped so far into cynicism that he didn’t make any more sense than he did when he was insanely happy.
See, for me, the movie was about the quirk-tropes, but ultimately about how false they are. I saw it as being about how that feeling that the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl gives you is ultimately false. I thought she was an unformed character intentionally; I saw it as a critique of the whole idea of magical girls. It was like, “She makes the birds sing and the sun shine…so what?”
I think I agree with you that the emotions of their relationship are sort of false, but I felt like that was the point. That the twinkly nature of their courtship didn’t mean it was a real relationship. That’s why I think they go back and show how he misinterpreted and selectively remembered things all along. He ignored moments when it was clear it wasn’t going well. I don’t think the film endorses Tom’s sense of the relationship when it’s new, you know?
3 stephanie // Aug 3, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Linda: I don’t know you but may I just say “what she said”? (i am a sleep-deprived new mom is my excuse for not writing my own review).
I really loved the film and not just ’cause I was out of the house without the baby.
Also, I can’t stop listening to Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams”.
4 Lucas // Aug 3, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Mark, I thought the movie had tremendous style *and* substance. For me, some of the movie’s scenes were so emotionally accurate, I felt like they were cribbed from real life.
I do agree somewhat that Summer was not really fleshed out, but I think that’s the point, she was just an idea that he hung his love on, not really loving who she was, but rather who he imagined and wanted her to be.
For me, the movie’s excellent casting and cleverly structured screenplay really made this a special film. I’ve seen it twice and both times I laughed and cried, and could identify strongly with both Tom and Summer.
If there’s one thing that sort of bothered me, it was the narration.
Just my two cents!
5 Renée // Aug 3, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I liked the movie, but I think Summer could still have spoken for herself and served as an ideal for Tom to hang his hopes on. I was okay with her being a cipher until the twist, at which point I wish they had really given her more of a personality, because in that moment she started engaging in the real world, and I wanted to know why.
But I think the whimsy factor and narration were actually good choices to illustrate how Tom could have glossed over all the warning signs with Summer. Lazy, perhaps, but it’s a pretty good representation of how you can be in the moment and floating above it at the same time.
Also, I see this becoming essential post-breakup viewing for 20-30-somethings in the near future.
6 Destiny // Aug 4, 2009 at 3:01 am
The expectation vs. reality scene was enough for me to love this movie because it showed so perfectly how we create these fictions and project our own desires on to other people. I think the fact that Tom doesn’t really know Summer is part of the point. It’s not just that she doesn’t share everything with him, but he also doesn’t see what he doesn’t want to see. She pushes him to be an architect, but we never really learn what she wants to do in her career. I saw that as part of Tom’s selective and self-centered memory and not an oversight of the writers.
I loved a lot of the subtle touches, like the fact that Summer is always wearing some shade of blue. In the scene where the guy hits on Summer in the bar, I saw that moment as a heightened moment used to highlight Tom’s internalized doubts about his role in Summer’s life. The way I saw it, the incident was much bigger in Tom’s memory than it actually was in reality (sort of like the big dance number)
I’m still on the fence a little about the narration, it seems as if there could have been a more clever way to get those ideas across, but all in all, I really enjoyed 500 Days and I plan to go see it again.
7 Jim // Aug 4, 2009 at 12:49 pm
All due respect to everyone who enjoyed this movie. Everything you guys got out of it is great stuff. My response is critical and you shouldn’t read it if will upset you or take away from your good experience.
To me, this felt like a movie whose target audience was 16-year-old girls who imagine what life after college might be like– which seems to be a new popular genre based on the previews before this movie. If the magical pixie girl myth was something this movie meant to pop, it certainly does it with a dull pin when the end finds our male protagonist heading towards a “real” relationship with an impossibly cute and nice Girl Next Door. I also took issue with the cribbing from actual movies sans acknowledgement– Annie Hall being the most obvious, but also The Lonely Guy– a Steve Martin vehicle from the 80′s that had Steve working at a greeting card company, writing an almost identical hate card to the one our indi-protagonist writes and I think giving a very similar but funnier quitting speech.
I definitely appreciate what this movie is saying about myth building in relationships and how it implies that you learn how to how to have real grown-up relationships only through experience. I even appreciate the idea that one might think one is over this kind of cosmic romantic hope only to find someone new who reignites it (Why do we keep doing it? Because we need the eggs– to quote Woody). I just found the ways this movie chooses to illustrate these concepts to be less interesting than they could be and have been.
So Mark, I agree with you completely, but I also accept that I might be too old for this movie, being in my early 30′s. Eternal Sunshine did it with much more grace and originality, in my humble opinion.
One thing this movie did do was remind of how brilliantly the ending of The Graduate does everything this movie aims to do in the space of about two minutes– by showing us the ending of The Graduate.
8 500 Days of Summer: Harrison Ford grinning deserves an A // Aug 7, 2009 at 12:19 pm
[...] knockout punch. Essentially: I can’t figure out if I really liked it or not. Judging by much more thoughtful comments like these, no one else can [...]
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