Salt Lake Tribune Review
How long is a relationship? When does it start? When does it end?
Two people in the same relationship may disagree. But give "(500) Days of Summer," a charmingly funny and achingly touching romance, extra points for its intriguing approach to answer those questions: a storyline that flashes forward and backward through a couple's timeline, with an onscreen counter marking the days.
Summer is not a season but a person, Summer Finn, played by the impossibly winsome
Zooey Deschanel. She's the boss's new assistant at a greeting-card company where Tom Hansen (
Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a copy writer. But the movie starts 290 days after that, when she tells him their relationship has devolved to that of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, the infamous punk rocker and the wife he stabbed to death. When Tom objects, saying he's not homicidal, Summer replies, "No, I'm Sid. You're Nancy."
From there, the narrative jumps back to Summer's first day of work - and Tom's long, hesitant efforts to get to know her. In those early efforts, we can see that the relationship may be doomed because each has different views about love: He believes it exists and can be found. She doesn't.
"I'm not looking for anything serious - is that OK?" Summer says after a fun visit to an IKEA store ends with them casually holding hands amid the bedroom sets. Tom says OK, though he and we are pretty sure he's lying.
First-time director Mark Webb and screenwriters
Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber capture, with humorous and heartbreaking accuracy, Tom's feelings at every stage of his relationship with Summer. He gushes over how much he loves the details of her face and body, and later finds in those same details things that annoy and enrage him.
Webb's visual bag of tricks is bottomless. And, throughout, he finds some of the most unique and romantic views of Los Angeles ever put to film.
But the key component that makes us care about Tom and Summer are the actors. Deschanel uses her bright eyes and offbeat beauty to make Summer's enigmatic tentativeness more endearing. Gordon-Levitt is all puppy-dog charm at first, but there's an intensity burning beneath. Together, they pull off the tough trick of making us root for their relationship to succeed and understand if it fails. By the end, 500 days spent with these cute kids doesn't seem enough.
-- Sean P. Means
Breezy Summer Fun
Submitted by: Digital Bath
With fifteen minutes remaining in the film, I disliked (500) Days of Summer a great deal. I felt like I was being slapped around by the director, and pushed in a direction I didn't want to go, and certainly didn't want the film to go.
At that point in the film, the story makes an abrupt, unexpected turn that had me confused. Had the writers run out of story? Wouldn't be the first time. Here's a novel idea, I was thinking to myself, make a shorter film!
The reason for the unexpected turn eventually gets explained, and, in all fairness to director Marc Webb, it plays out in a really decent way. In fact, the collective scenes that make it up that bit of the story wind up being one of the best parts of the entire film. Still, I don't like being toyed with by filmmakers, which is generally my heartburn with films of the Rom-Com genre.
That said, I did like this film. It's not great, and is much lighter fare than I generally seek, but it turned out to be a nice change of pace for me. It was entertaining throughout.
