His Take/Her Take: (500) Days Of Summer

Worth the price of admission, or a waste of time? Brian McKechnie and Suzanne Ellis offer you their take on the latest movies hitting screens. Read their reviews every week, exclusively on CityNews.ca.

Let Brian and Suzanne know what you think of His Take/Her Take via email at brian.mckechnie@citynews.ca or suzanne.ellis@citynews.ca .

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER

Rated PG-13
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel
Directed by: Marc Webb
Official Site IMDb

This is not a love story. It’s a story about love.

Brian’s Take

*** out of 5 stars

(500) Days of Summer is a relentless anti-romcom for the hipster crowd that could also be called the saddest feel good movie of the year. You’re warned at the beginning that this is a story about love and not a love story. If you’re looking for the latter this is not for you. If you want something fresh stick around.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young, single thirty-something who writes greeting cards for a living. When Summer (Zooey Deschanel) starts working in his office he’s immediately taken by her (she’s young, beautiful, dresses differently and likes The Smiths). After weeks of failed attempts trying to ask her on a date it takes a night of drunken karaoke for Tom to tell her how he feels. Summer is interested too but makes it clear she’s not looking for love or marriage (she doesn’t believe in either). For the next few months they have a good time together, go to IKEA, have interesting sex, shop for records and seem to really like each other. Unfortunately that’s not enough for Summer and while Tom falls in love, she does not.

Gordon-Levitt has come a long way since playing a teenage alien on the television show 3rd Rock from the Sun . His role in Gregg Araki’s 2004 film Mysterious Skin erased most of the goofy expectations we had of him (he plays a gay hustler). He followed that up in 2005 with Brick ; a film about murder, drugs and high school that has haunted me since seeing it. Although playing Tom is a little fluffy for him (he followed Brick with the heavy films The Lookout , Stop-Loss , Miracle of St. Anna and Killshot ) he still shines in it it and shows how versatile he is as an actor (he even sings and dances).

The flipside of Gordon-Levitt is Deschanel, who I’m usually a big fan of. Summer is no different than most of the characters she’s recently played ( Yes Man , Gigantic ) and my interest in her is fading fast. I also found it hard to see anything likeable about Summer, even in the beginning, and was totally turned off by her. This could be because she reminded me of an ex-girlfriend or because the role wasn’t written well. If the character was stronger I probably would have given this four stars instead of three.

Director Marc Webb, who has a long career directing music videos, uses a lot of visual tricks in (500) Days. These include split-screen moments, 8mm footage, title cards and a Mary Poppins inspired song-and-dance number. Although some of these work better than others they all have creativity behind them and help keep the story interesting and moving along. I like Webb’s style and he has definitely made it onto my radar.

Similar to Away We Go , (500) Days of Summer is geared towards people in their early 30s. With its too cool soundtrack (featuring The Smiths, Feist, Wolfmother, Simon & Garfunkel and of course Deschanel’s band She & Him), jumping storyline and its take on love and marriage; it’s got a vibe that might not be for everyone. Get past those nuisances and you’ll find a great little movie worth checking out. You might want to avoid if you’ve just broken up with someone though.

Suzanne’s Take

**** out of 5 stars

Tom is Summer’s Mr. Right Now. The trouble is, he wants to be her Mr. Right.

That’s the romantic conundrum at the heart of (500) Days of Summer , a bittersweet and clever comedy from first-time director Marc Webb. In what may well be a career-defining performance, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ( Brick, The Lookout) stars as Tom Hansen, an aspiring architect working as a writer at a greeting card company. A hopeless romantic, Tom believes he won’t be happy until he meets ‘The One.’ That moment occurs, or so he believes, when Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) takes a job as his boss’s assistant.

Tom and Summer hit it off almost immediately, and despite Summer’s vastly different views on love — she’s not sure she believes in it and just wants to have fun — he falls hard for her and clings tightly to the belief that eventually she’ll fall for him too. As we know from the outset though, this relationship has a 500-day shelf-life, and through Tom’s eyes we experience its ecstatic rise and agonizing fall.

Skipping back and forth in time is not a new device in film, but in this context it works as Tom tries to piece together just how and when everything fell apart for him and Summer. Was it the time he made fun of her favourite Beatle, Ringo? Or maybe the time he lost his temper with an obnoxious guy who was hitting on her in a bar? Or perhaps, like so many relationships, it just ran its course for her. Tom’s memories, both good and bad, ring true, and you can’t help but feel for him when Summer declares it’s over.

Because this is a film where you know the end at the start, the joys are found in the little moments of Tom and Summer’s story. An afternoon where they sit at the park shouting out dirty words for shock value, or a shopping trip to IKEA where they pretend the showroom is their actual home. There’s also a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek musical sequence set to the Hall & Oates classic You Make My Dreams Come True , complete with a marching band and animated bluebirds. (I’d recommend the movie for this scene alone.)

Key to making (500) Days of Summer work is the likeability of the two leads – Gordon-Levitt has an everyman quality about him and even when Tom is saying not-nice things about the woman who broke his heart you still adore him. Summer isn’t a huge stretch for Deschanel, who has the goofy-but-sweet thing down-pat. They have excellent chemistry, and are absolutely plausible as a young couple. The supporting cast, including Geoffrey Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler as Tom’s friends, is essentially window-dressing.

Director Webb, previously known for his work on music videos, utilizes a number of other familiar cinematic devices to tell the story, but they’re employed in such a way that they feel fresh. One sequence unfolds in split-screen, with one half representing Tom’s expectations of a certain night, and the other representing the reality of what actually occurs. It could be hokey – instead, it’s heartbreaking.

When I think about relationship movies that have stood the test of time, Annie Hall , When Harry Met Sally , and Say Anything spring to my mind. Does (500) Days of Summer deserve a place among them? In my mind, absolutely.