Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a frustrated architect, frittering his life away at a Los Angeles greetings card company. Hope arrives in the form of Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), his boss’s attractive new assistant. When she expresses a liking for the Smiths, his favourite band, he’s smitten and it isn’t long before they’re making out by the photocopier. The problem is, she wants to keep things casual, while he begins to fall in love with her.
Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer has been hailed by Nick Hornby as the most true-to-life romantic comedy of the past 20 years and you can see what he means. Unlike 99 per cent of rom-coms, the central couple break up and don’t get back together. Tom doesn’t live happily ever after in the arms of his sweetheart, but ends up broken-hearted and depressed.
This is Morrissey’s take on romantic love, not Richard Curtis’s. The film is not so much a romantic comedy as a commentary on the shortcomings of the genre. Yet the film-makers want to have their cake and eat it, since in most other respects (500) Days of Summer sticks to the basic formula. All the most successful scenes are borrowed from other rom-coms. For instance, after Tom finally consummates his love for Summer, there’s a song-and-dance number in which we see him leaping and pirouetting through the streets of LA. That’s straight out of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. There’s also the obligatory karaoke scene that every rom-com has to have since it was introduced in My Best Friend’s Wedding. There’s something a little dishonest about flaunting your superiority to the makers of mainstream romantic comedies and then plundering them for booty.
The film’s big set piece is a work meeting at the greetings card company in which Tom attacks his colleagues for peddling lies about human relationships and then resigns in a fit of moral indignation. But what is the point being made here? Are the makers of (500) Days of Summer challenging the sentimental worldview that underpins the whole rom-com genre? Or is this scene just supposed to telegraph how jaundiced and cynical Tom has become after having his heart broken?
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The answer is both: the film-makers want to earn points with young moviegoers for attacking an unfashionable genre, and yet they want to leave open the possibility that Tom’s disillusionment with romantic love is only temporary. And so it proves to be, since by the end all his illusions have been restored. The creative team behind (500) Days of Summer aren’t questioning the philosophical outlook of the makers of rom-coms, they’re just turning their noses up at lesser talents for expressing that point of view in such a middle-aged way. Richard Curtis’s only crime is being too square.
Webb and his writers Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber demonstrate just how cool they are by telling Tom and Summer’s story in a non-linear way, flitting back and forth between different points in the relationship. Fractured narratives can sometimes enhance the dramatic impact of a story, as in the recent Duplicity, but all too often they’re just a way of trying to give conventional material the appearance of originality and that is the case here.
The film isn’t terrible. Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are engaging leads and there are some funny moments. But it is hardly the freshest romantic comedy of the past 20 years. Taking the best bits from other movies and rearranging them in a non-linear sequence does not make for an original film.
12A, 95mins