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(95) Minutes of Truth (500) Days of Summer opens July 31 Rated: PG-13 By Alex Clarke American Heritage
If there is any one thing we, as an audience, expect a film to do, it is for the people, the places and the emotion of a movie to fall inside the frame of a well-polished mirror reflecting our own lives. At the beginning of the film, an anonymous narrator states, "This is not a love story. This is a story about love." (500) Days of Summer, perhaps the most real film in ages, appears quite ordinary at first view, if you don’t look hard enough. It has the basis of the most hashed-out story idea in the world: boy meets girl. Thankfully, that is the length of Summer’s cliché count. The first scene shows the audience the 488th day that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a despondent greeting card writer who believes in true love, fate and destiny, knows Summer ( Zooey Deschanel), a loveable, flighty assistant who rests on the foundation that love is a sham. Next, the film jumps back to day one, illustrating how Tom first lays eyes on Summer. The movie zigzags through events, jumping back and forth and juxtaposing different days in time; an exciting, playful romp through an Ikea on day 31 follows a depressing visit to the same store on day 238. What appears to be a randomization of events slowly becomes a clear picture. In his first feature-length film, music video director Marc Webb uses his experience to cut a film that paces tactfully through the moments of a 500-day "relationship." The film strays from the overwrought romantic-comedy impulse to show the slow, yet eventual courtship of two people to keep a clean focus on the emotions of the leading man: Summer is Tom's story. From a superbly written script unafraid to show even the awkward, generally uninteresting tidbits of normal conversation, Gordon-Levitt (Brick) demonstrates his broad acting range, aided by the equally powerful Deschanel (Yes Man). Their performances, however, fall second to Webb's unique, "experimental" direction. The best moments of the film are not literal, but showcases meant to expose Tom’s inner emotions. The morning after being with Summer for the first time, Tom struts down the avenue, pulling in strangers and passers-by to start a street-wide dance number to Hall and Oates’ You Make My Dreams. During a rockier period in their relationship, Tom imagines himself in an early 1900s-esque French film with some dandy symbolism as he loses a chess game to cupid. It is with Webb’s direction that the audience learns the narrator was right. This film is not about a love story. It is a real-life reflection, a movie that questions the meaning, and usefulness, of fate. The relationship, the connection the two characters are supposed to have, is not the issue. What we are meant to think on is the idea preconceived notions can fool us, and how hard it is to experience love as a pure emotion. |
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