(500) Days of Summer (2009) Review

If this is the direction that the romantic comedy genre is heading in . . . then I LOVE IT. Yes, I was very impressed with this film and found it funny, romantic, heartbreaking and just brilliant all rolled into one. Yes it was different and not a traditional Hollywood romance and falling in love. I think that it captured more what happens in the real world nowadays.  From seeing the trailer’s of this film I thought I seemed very much like Summer (Zooey Deschanel) but after seeing the movie I am only like her in certain parts.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) fell in love with Summer pretty much straight away. Which is already the start of what seems to be role reversal as its more often seen as the female who falls for a man straight away, so this set the tone that this was not going to be your normal “love” story. But I suppose it was good to see it from the other way around. How a guy acts if he is in love with a girl who does not feel the same way back.

So the film flips backwards and forwards through the relationship back to day 1 then forward to towards the end. Showing why he is sad at a certain song or event because it meant something more than 200 days previous to that. So it was very much going from early days to later days and I found this to be a very good way to do the story. Because while in the first few weeks or even months everything just seems fantastic and so nice but when you hit the later days those same things you may have found cute or loved about the person, now in the later days you hate those very things that you once loved about them.

I had heard that this was going to be a different type of romantic comedy and as I said above if this is the direction rom-com is going in then that really is great. Seeing a guy being totally in love with a girl who does not love him back is totally a shift in power in terms of movies as not many at all have the man being the one who as fallen it is usually the other way round.

Performance wise I was very impressed with both Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who I have to admit had only seen in “10 Things I Hate About You”) and Zooey Deschanel (who I watched in “The Happening” a few days before) as they really created character’s who were both believableand likeable which is not something that is usually done at the same time in films. But I felt sorry for Tom and thought he deserved better, or did he? Maybe he just did not understand that Summer did not want anything from him other than sex. She always did make it clear that it was not a relationship and she not want it to be a relationship now or ever. I think that’s possibly a problem with some situation the old saying of can a guy and a girl be friends without one of them feeling something? Maybe that was the case in this story and is the case for million of people around the world. But obviously Tom and Summer did cross the friend only line, and did act more like a couple than just friends who had sex. Hence Tom getting very confused and Summer getting kinda claustrophobic as Tom wanted to label her his girlfriend.

I found this film to raise many very interesting questions which you have possibly wondered the answer to on many occasions in your own life when you have been confused if someone is a friend or more, or even if either of you want more out of the friendship. This has to happen so much, I am sure it has happened to myself on a few occasions. But once you cross over the friend only line, can you ever really go back? Maybe but I guess as in Tom’s case it depends if you were the one who fell for the other person. I think it can only work if neither of you actually fall for each other (or admit it to the other person) that it can therefore go back to “normal” or the way it was before.

The ending of the film was not really a surpriseafter lets say the first five minutes or something like that but it was not really predictable on how they got to that point. When Tom was at the interview at the end and met Autumn was particularly amusing because my friend had just said imagine if she was called Autumn so that was us totally hysterically laughing. Then the counter starting again at 1 . . . but this time would that counter end for Tom? Or did he find the one . . . I guess that is up to the audience to decide unless a movie called (500) Days of Autumn is announced.