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Thread: (500) DAYS OF SUMMER (Marc Webb 2009)

  1. #1
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    (500) DAYS OF SUMMER (Marc Webb 2009)

    [COLOR= royalblue]Marc Webb: (500) DAYS OF SUMMER (2009)[/color]

    Review by Chris Knipp

    Rom-com with a twist is really conventional -- but still sweet

    w a r n i n g: s p o i l e r

    (500) Days of Summer is a romantic comedy with a new approach. What is original is not the indie mannerisms of this Sundance hit -- the references to groups like The Smiths, the meet-cute at a greeting card company, the tendentious voice-over, or the jumbled chronology, but the fact that the couple doesn't live happily ever after. This is the story of a love affair that goes south. It's made clear right off the bat that the wooing of Summer (Zooey Deschanel) by Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) led to disappointment for Tom. With its downbeat story arc and only mildly hopeful finale, Days defeats genre expectations. But it still works within a highly conventional framework.

    And so you'd better like the stars. The faces of Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel dominate the screen. Indeed they seem a cute and well-matched couple, the reedy, deep-voiced Gordon-Levitt, with his buttoned-down appearance and mobile face, and the winsome, wide-eyed Deschanel. Gordon-Levitt has the more interesting and challenging role. He runs a gamut of emotions, beginning interested and doubtful when Summer becomes the boss's assistant at the greeting card company where he works; then growing hopeful, falling in love, walking on air (even doing a song and dance number with a movie-musical chorus line) after they finally have sex, playful and delighted; then despairing, hopes dashed, numbed, drunken; and briefly hopeful again after a separation when Summer walks away from Tom and her job, and they meet once more on the way to a wedding, she invites him to a party, and he thinks they'll get back together. Gordon-Leavitt is good: he's always working, and it never shows.

    Deschanel is less interesting to observe. Her character is bland and elusive. Summer seems to alternate only between giving in and pushing away. It's hard not to think, if you're a man, that Summer's a terrible tease; that she breaks Tom's heart without a qualm. Didn't she say she just wanted to be friends? Yes, she did. So from the female viewpoint, Tom is pushy and adolescent. He doesn't listen. But then why does Summer engage with Tom in experimental shower sex and humorously play house with him at Ikea? He's a romantic who believes in destiny. The twist is that Summer is converted to a belief in these things by finding a man, but that man is not Tom. Meanwhile the failure of his romance with Summer has shattered Tom's romantic illusions. One good thing comes out of it for him: he can't write cheery jingles anymore and goes back to pursuing a career as an architect.

    Deschenel has had many roles in films, but they linger mostly on notes that are winsome and fey; she's the Hollywood quirky deadpan girl (notable efforts are All the Real Girls, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and Tin Man). Gordon-Leavitt, on the other hand, has shown daring and skill in the range of roles he's played in Manic (a violent, disturbed youth), The Lookout (a brain-damaged sports hero who turns to crime), Latter Days (a homophobic Mormon), Mysterous Skin (a gay hustler), Brick (a high school detective), and Stop-Loss (a gung-ho young soldier). He's been good in all of these and they've been interesting films. The conventionality of this relatively mainstream rom-com role in (500) Days of Summer is, paradoxically, a new challenge for him. Deschanel, who definitely had a fresh appeal when she started out, has chosen some notably dubious films to be in, such as Elf, Failure to Launch, Yes Man, and The Happening. Though fans of Deschanel say this is one of her best parts, both the actress and the writing of her character weaken the film. Snapshots of previous lovers aside, Summer has no background, her job is undefined, and we don't get to know her friends. The cute but recessive Deschanel doesn't emerge as a clearcut personality.

    Despite the twist of the negative ending, the more you think about (500) Days of Summer the more conventional it seems. Its worst element is its gratingly insistent shifts back and forth in time over the famous 500 days, signaled by an onscreen clicker whose specificity (day 442, day 3, day 157, whatever) doesn't keep it from being ultimately numbing and confusing. If you can keep all these numbers in your head, good for you; but the shuffling seems anything but enlightening. Sure, it's meant to convey the mosaic of feelings a tangled relationship leaves behind in the memory of the victim. But it's also a needless distraction, a "modernist" device to keep the audience busy but a sign the filmmakers neglected the harder job of crafting a coherent narrative. A reversed or jumbled chronology is a cliche' by now. The only enlightenment we get from this one is a sense of the obvious: that sometimes things were going well between Tom and Summer, and sometimes they weren't. And that Summer always saw things differently from Tom, because he fell in love and she knew all along he wasn't the one.

    Something utterly routine is the pair of buddies who'd like to advise Tom but can't because the nerdy McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend) is a perpetual loser with the ladies and the chiseled-cheeked Paul (Matthew Gray Gubler) has been with the same girl since elementary school. The only difference from convention is that they aren't comical or tricksters as in films like 40 Days and 40 Nights or Knocked Up.

    But while the latter two movies may be more fun, (500) Days of Summer, despite my reservations, is enjoyable viewing because of the cute couple that charms you and the heartbreak that touches you. Cuteness and charm and heartbreak, if you don't intrude on them too much, go a long way, and even the convoluted time-scheme can't obliterate them. But if Marc Webb and writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber sought to reinvent the wheel, they still came up with the familiar round utensil.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-20-2009 at 10:51 PM.

  2. #2
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    A page from Nathan Lee.

    Since this is the rom-com of the season, I hope more people get to see it to comment.

    Nathan Lee did and what he has to say appears in an NPR review. His critical blade has a sharper edge to it than mine, so he draws some blood But he and I and New York MAgazine's Edelstein all agree on an essential weakness of the film: the blankness of the female lead.
    Summer embodies woman as titillating enigma: mercurial, unfathomable, covetable. At times she suggests a '60s gamin, like an Anna Karina bedazzling a Godard film with her enigmatic self-possession. But where Karina's magic inhered in the radiant sense that she was in possession of something, no matter how inscrutable to Godard or the audience, Deschanel is a shell. There's no there there.
    And later in the review, my conclusion also, that it's still hard not to like the story's protagonists:
    Amazing, then, that both Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt manage to shine through this heap of hegemonic cliches. It's impossible not to fall a little bit in love with them, and I suppose it's only fitting that, as the movie proceeds, our affections cool.
    Nathan thinks this is Nora Efron for young hipsters:
    Style and surface are very much the point of this aggressively hip rom-com, a movie designed to appeal to cool kids who wouldn't be caught dead at a Nora Ephron flick, but who crave their corny sentiments all the same.
    I don't know about Nora Efron, but it's true this is a conventional rom-com in new clothing. Remember, though, we do fall a little bit in love with Tom and Summer (and sympathize with Tom's heartache). We just have to, and there's no harm in it.

    I agree also with Lee's sense of how the scrmbled 500-day clicker time scheme works:
    Scrambling the chronology gives the story a gloss of structural innovation that protects the filmmakers, and the audience, from the old-fashioned demands of a deeply felt love story.
    I'm a little less harsh overall in my disapproval, as befits my greater age and mellowness. But I basically agree with all this. Lee's film writing is always fun, and sometimes, as here, spot-on.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 07-20-2009 at 11:45 PM.

  3. #3
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    500 Days of Summer (2009)

    Whenever I watch a new romantic comedy, I can't help but be transported to my memories of the one that invented the genre (It Happened one Night) , the three Cukor-Hepburn-Grant collaborations that constitute the pinnacle of achievement within it (Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story), and Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story. My memories of these movies are very fresh because I feel compelled to re-watch them periodically. It is perhaps unfair to compare contemporary romantic comedies to the venerable classics. And one wouldn't want contemporary filmmakers to attempt to copy what's been done in the past. But it is useful to have a clear idea of the history of the genre and its highest accomplishments. I find it rather difficult to find, among films made after WWII, romantic comedies of comparable quality. Three come quickly to mind: Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Groundhog Day (1993), and Peyton Reed's Down With Love (2003), which is superior to the 1960s Rock Hudson/Doris Day films that inspired it.

    500 Days of Summer, the latest "rom com" to receive a theatrical release is not as good as the ones I have mentioned but it seems to me more enjoyable and freshly inspired than any example of the genre released since Down with Love, which has a female lead that regards love as an unnecessary complication, just like Summer (Zoe Deschanel). 500 Days of Summer assumes the point of view of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the male lead, and shows you their break-up during the first few minutes. Knowing that they do not end up together, the film travels freely back and forth choosing specific days from the 500 that transpire from their meeting at work to a coming-to-terms with their divergent future lives. Director Marc Webb transgresses audience expectations of the genre, which dictate that the leads end up happy together, to facilitate the viewer's focus on how precisely the romance came to an end.

    500 Days of Summer livens up the proceedings with a number of formal inventions. These include a joyous musical number to express Tom's buoyant mood the morning after first-time sex, and adroit use of split-screens to show simultaneously Tom's expectations of a party at Summer's apartment and what actually took place there. Other devices, including Tom's intermittent voice-over, are less successful.

    The film is not consistently brilliant or insightful. The fact that the portrait of Summer is drawn rigorously from Tom's limited perspective robs her character of sufficient nuance. And yet, a lot of the material works well and the actors are both quite winsome and attractive. The whole film is crafted with care and with a palpable desire to reflect honestly on what happens when romantic relationships don't end up meeting our loftier expectations.

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    I find it hard to see the musical number a "formal invention". It's a cliche now any maybe something the French do better (I can name three examples). So is split-screen, though that works okay.
    And yet, a lot of the material works well and the actors are both quite winsome and attractive.
    Yes. I agree, and I said that above. And so does Nathan Lee, in the quote I gave. I don't quite see how your listing of classics and what you think are the best modern examples of the genre contributes here. You don't draw specific parallels. This is a rather wan effort, however "sincere" and well cast, and its appeal to a bogus sense of hipness in its audience is an easy way of gaining summer art-house favor, like focusing on PBS stardom in Julie & Julia.

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    A Difficult to Watch and Enjoy Romantic Drama

    I didn't really experience this movie as a comedy at all. And Chris Knipp's commentary is insightful and very detailed hitting on many the problems with this movie. Knipp's greatest weakness and perhaps only weakness in his comments is how he arrived at enjoying this movie. I took all the problems that Knipp has raised and went away from this movie with a big disappointment and which based on Knipp's appraisal except his conclusion seem to support this conclusion.

  6. #6
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    I did not greatly enjoy the movie, though I liked the actors, particularly Gordon-Leavitt. It seemed overrated by critics, but I notice that it was somewhat forgotten at awards time.

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