In a way, the tagline for (500) Days of Summer says it all and says nothing at all: “Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.”
Sure, it neatly captures the story of Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) as they meet and date and part – to still be friends she hopes. But the movie’s many pleasures avoid such easy description. They have nothing to do with story. They have everything to do with storytelling.
I’ve always been a sucker for novels that tell the mere wisp of a story, but do so with great style, novels like Franny & Zooey and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I was a sucker for this movie as well. It very playfully tells a very simple story. I was even reminded of the writing style of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers, often.
The title may be a bit misleading. It suggests that the movie will chronicle a summer that doesn’t want to end, it being so bright, so happy and carefree. But what we find on the screen instead is a rather free-wheeling woman – like a distant cousin of her namesake Huck Finn – taking her own Tom through 500 days of ups and downs, of happiness and sadness.
The “summer” of the title doesn’t have anything to do with the seasons – although it does lead in the end to a rather nice seasonal joke. The “(500) Days” of the title though does lend the film a nifty structure. It’s a movie of constant hopping, skipping, and jumping through time with a number graphic helping us keep track. Now we’re at day 45, we’re told. Then we’re comparing that day’s happiness to the sadness of day 344. And so on.
The movie is in love with movies. We get a flirtatious series of close-ups of Summer sprawled on a bed, toying with Tom and with us, her black haircut evoking ‘60s French movie star Anna Karina at her most precocious. We get homage to that great American ‘60s movie The Graduate. But it is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall that it touches most often.
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