Love Will Tear Us Apart

Tom is not the victim.

Tom is only a victim of his own sensibilities and romantic outlook on life. It's not to say that Tom's outlook on life is bad, it's that it's idealistic and he leads himself into situations where he can only get hurt. Tom's real fault is that he is shallow. He begins to like Summer because she likes The Smiths, and in his mind, that makes her stand out. A lot of people like The Smiths, and it's nice to find a woman that you have things in common with, but Tom mistakes similar tastes in music with deep compatibility.

This isn't a slight on the writing in the film, it's a bear hug for the writing. I'm not pointing out a mistake, I'm pointing out something that the writers purposefully inserted that nobody I've talked to about this movie seems to understand.

Tom says as much himself towards the end of the film. His real revelation is that he's unassertive; he hasn't been in enough relationships in his life and he's come to romanticize them because the closest thing he has to real experience is movies and music and watching his friends' supposedly happy relationships, and he's so old and inexperienced that those have replaced his actual romantic sensibilities.

As a result, he seems incapable of making a serious assessment about the relationship and seen himself and Summer for what they really are: desperately wrong for each other.

I open with this because everybody on the planet has seen the movie and came away with incorrect conclusions about Tom's character.

For those of you who don't know (ha ha), 500 Days of Summer follows Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from his meeting to his breakup with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and up to his acceptance, in total a tally of 500 days.

Tom is a great protagonist. Like another great protagonist earlier this year, the whole film is filtered through his eyes. That means when we see his relationship with Summer and it seems so perfect and idyllic, it's not because it actually way, but because Tom refuses to remember anything that wasn't perfectly idyllic. Because of this, Tom is the perfect surrogate for the average male who has experienced a similar breakup. He reacts in a way that every man does. Lethargic rage, denying it, absurd fantasies.

The film is so stylized because that's how Tom's brain is functioning, and the essence of every aspect of the relationship is so perfectly captured by director Marc Webb. The morning after they first have sex is a giant dance number, the most perfect dramatization of of the first wave of infatuation.

Marc Webb's bag of tricks is shoulder-deep. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are marvelous, Deschanel in particular, who plays the ultimate manic pixie dreamgirl. But Deschanel's performance elevates the material out of cliche. She's a realistic human being, likely to remind you of someone you know and make the drama of the film all the more poignant. But while Deschanel brings depth to a certain aspect of the film, the whole film relies on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance and he is typically fantastic, which is wholly unsurprising; in the years since I first saw Brick I have followed his career with great interest and he hasn't done anything to disappoint me so far.

The decision to make a romantic comedy from a distinctly male perspective is inspired. So few romances appeal to men, but not because romance doesn't appeal to men at all, but because romances are generally geared toward a feminine sensibility. Men have a completely different set of neuroses when it comes to love and a different way of dealing with a break-up. It's almost violating to see it on the screen because it's something that we've never been exposed to this well before.

This is one of the strongest, most sincere and most realistic films about breaking up I've ever seen. It belongs with the best films on the subject, a pantheon ruled by Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

And comparison to those two films is high praise indeed.

9/10