(500) Days of Summer is a fairly depressing story. Boy (Tom Hansen, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets girl (Summer Finn a la Zooey Deschanel). Boy falls harder for girl than girl does for boy. Girl starts acting weird. Girl tells boy they should stop seeing each other. Boy can’t handle this and tries to get her back until he comes to terms with what has happened and moves on.
Sound familiar? Me too. Sound like a lame plot for a movie? Well, yes — but that’s the point.
The film is really about what we face every day during a reality that’s rarely glamorous. As banal as quotidian life might seem, it’s something most people must face as they become disillusioned about the way adult life works, both during and immediately after college. You might not be able to get a job in your dream field. You might still live 20 minutes from your parents (or with your parents).
Then suddenly, someone comes along who thinks you should blow this Popsicle stand and pretend you live in IKEA. How much better is singing bad karaoke and kissing in the copy room at work than sitting in your apartment wishing you had enough guts to actually follow your dreams? So much that, to borrow from another script, you feel infinite.
And then it all comes crashing down. This sucks, and you hate yourself, and you hate the other person for doing this to you and taking away the shred of hope lingering in the back of your throat that you were worth something. It’s both overdramatic and simplified, but these are the truths of heartbreak. (500) Days of Summer conveys this beautifully and manages to add in enough dry humor that you’re entertained as well as enlightened.
At the same time, the film’s other layers manage to give it the sense of otherworldliness that comes with movies that don’t actually parallel real life. Writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber distort the chronology; at one point, director Marc Webb uses a split screen labeled “Reality” and “Expectations” with simultaneous but obviously different sequences; and all three creators construct a soundtrack that could almost moonlight as another character for how omnipresent it is in the film.
I have gone to IKEA and pretended that all the Swedish titles on the bookshelves were actually mine, but oh, how difficult it was to read them. I have had a city skyline tattooed on my arm with Sharpie, as Deschanel does after asking Gordon-Levitt to show her his latent architectural skills. I have sat on the same bench on the same hill in the same park in Los Angeles where an iconic scene was filmed, and I watched the city churn below me. I have lost my summer, but I have found my autumn. And if you have the chance, you should, too.
[ READ MORE: LIST: Movies you need to see before graduating ]
