(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
Tom, greeting-card writer and hopeless romantic, is caught completely off-guard when his girlfriend, Summer, suddenly dumps him. He reflects on their 500 days together to try to figure out where their love affair went sour, and in doing so, Tom rediscovers his true passions in life.
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21 films that influenced (500) Days of Summer
What critics say influenced (500) Days of Summer
A feature debut for the director, Mr. Webb, the film is an odd combination of self-referential, in the spirit of its lovers, and insistently referential in its wink-and-nod homages to such classics as “The Graduate” and “The Seventh Seal.”
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, references a lot of movies, from "The Seventh Seal" to "The Graduate," but the one it seems to be channeling the most effectively (and most unconsciously) is "Annie Hall."
Zach Braff’s Garden State may be the closest analog—both explicitly reference The Graduate, that touchstone of generational uncertainty—but (500) Days Of Summer is more thoughtful, and thus more maddening in its shortcomings.
The kickoff entry for the Philadelphia Film Festival / Cinefest '09, (500) Days uses that Miller quotation (loosely) and adds a bit more cultural heft to its helium-balloon romance by referencing the French new wave, The Graduate, and art deco architecture.
For a movie about heartfelt connections, its characters have no depth or substance; for one about love, it has no chemistry or spontaneity; the action takes place in Los Angeles, though we see almost none of it; and a reference to “The Graduate” does the film no favors.
Near the end of Tom and Summer's 500 days together, they go to a matinee of The Graduate, and as they watch the final scene (Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in the back of the bus, staring numbly ahead), Summer weeps miserably, while Tom appears transported by the romance of it all.
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, references a lot of movies, from "The Seventh Seal" to "The Graduate," but the one it seems to be channeling the most effectively (and most unconsciously) is "Annie Hall."
Speaking of neurotics, this latter-day Annie Hall substitutes downtown Los Angeles for New York (Tom's unfulfilled desire to be an architect provides an excuse to ogle landmarks), and a montage of Euro art house parodies indirectly nods to the film's strong Woody Allen influence.
Annie Hall keeps getting invoked in reviews, though the temporal flea-hopping feels closer to Franois Ozons 5x2, which dissected a relationship by recalling its stages in reverse order.
Then again, Tom’s grounding advice-dispensing kid sister seems mostly a reminder of how much we all love Bottle Rocket, while split-screens and personalized Bergman parodies are stray corridors off Annie Hall.
(500) Days of Summer , like Woody Allen's Annie Hall , dissects a romance that didn't work with a retrospective ache.
Where Annie Hall had the famous subtitled scene in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton said one thing and thought another, (500) Days of Summer has a similarly clever split-screen segment, with half of the screen devoted to "Reality" and the other to "Expectation."
A feature debut for the director, Mr. Webb, the film is an odd combination of self-referential, in the spirit of its lovers, and insistently referential in its wink-and-nod homages to such classics as “The Graduate” and “The Seventh Seal.”
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, references a lot of movies, from "The Seventh Seal" to "The Graduate," but the one it seems to be channeling the most effectively (and most unconsciously) is "Annie Hall."
(He’s less successful in a misguided parody of foreign-movie cliches: does anybody take “The Seventh Seal” as a touchstone anymore?) Deschanel doesn’t come off nearly as well, largely because Summer is rather a self-absorbed, hard character, and she plays it that way.
Zach Braff’s Garden State may be the closest analog—both explicitly reference The Graduate, that touchstone of generational uncertainty—but (500) Days Of Summer is more thoughtful, and thus more maddening in its shortcomings.
It’s too soon to tell whether (500) Days of Summer will emerge as an Annie Hall or The Graduate for this generation — or at least supplant Garden State insofar as being the movie of choice for lovelorn folks trying to make some sense out of their lives.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are both superb in their roles, and in its mixture of emotion and quirk, the movie has a nice Garden State-y feel to it.
(500) Days has pretensions to being the anti- Garden State —a movie where the quirky dream girl doesn’t so much save the hero as make him stumble and accidentally fall forward.
The conclusion does reclaim some of the film’s early spunk, and that springboard may be all film-festival audiences need to declare to their friends that they were among the first to see the next Garden State or Juno.
It’s a Shins-in-Garden State moment, all but breaking the fourth wall to invite the audience to feel an affinity (whether cultural or, less charitably, demographic) with the movie.
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And it's reminiscent of another auspicious debut: Spike Jonze's helming of the intricately structured "Being John Malkovich."
For a lot of casual filmgoers in their teens and 20s -- the ones yet to encounter a Charlie Kaufman script such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or who haven't seen the bittersweet 1967 "Two for the Road," written by Frederic Raphael, or have yet to dive into a Milan Kundera novel -- the structural mind games played by the romantic comedy "(500) Days of Summer" may throw them, happily, for a loop.
Come to think of it, as with that overrated gimmick flick Memento, the only reason this movie doesn't play out in a forward-linear fashion is that it's all so structurally obvious that there would be no point (Two for the Road, it ain't).
Images of this boy's life and that girl's existence provide a smart riff on the split-screen moments Doris Day and Rock Hudson shared in the fluffy romance "Pillow Talk.
An understated architectural tour of Los Angeles recalls Sam Waterston's Big Apple presentation in Hannah and Her Sisters.
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It’s note of romantic pining bears echoes of Say Anything but it’s treatment of the therapeutic powers of love in an otherwise miserable, doubt-fraught existence was far more richly examined in Greg Mottola’s Adventureland .
The end result is a consistently engaging and uncommonly genuine romcom that's as breezy as it is poignant, with the film's note-perfect conclusion cementing its place as a natural successor to such above average predecessors as Say Anything... and Before Sunrise.
It has been a long time, perhaps since "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," since a movie evoked the joys and pains of first love with such art and delicacy.
For a lot of casual filmgoers in their teens and 20s -- the ones yet to encounter a Charlie Kaufman script such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or who haven't seen the bittersweet 1967 "Two for the Road," written by Frederic Raphael, or have yet to dive into a Milan Kundera novel -- the structural mind games played by the romantic comedy "(500) Days of Summer" may throw them, happily, for a loop.
It is a small masterpiece of anti-romantic comedy, a member of the extremely rare fraternity of films like Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , sweet, delightful movies that are an absolute bliss to watch even as they hammer home the awkward and deeply un-movie truth that being in love is a lot of damn work with, usually, little or no reward whatsoever.