3/4
Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Geoffrey Arend, Matthew Gray Gubler
(500) Days of Summer is not a love story. We hear this at the beginning. It was in the original commercials. But this movie has been marketed incorrectly. Critics saw this movie as being hysterical. I saw it as being rather sad. As opposed to other relationship movies like He's Just Not That Into You that analyze relationships all the way through. (500) Days of Summer is, I guess, supposed to show why this relationship failed. All I saw was why this relationship never worked in the first place.
Summer (Deschanel) tells Tom (Levitt) that she's not interested in a serious relationship. Yet Tom is so convinced that Summer is "the one" that he convinces himself that he is in love with her, and is devastated when she wants to end it. He spends most of the movie trying to figure out ways to get Summer back, much to the disappointment of his friends (Arend and Gubler), who just want him to move on.
Tom meets Summer at his job, where he works as a greeting card writer. What Tom actually wants to do is be an architect. It's what he went to school for. Summer is just there as an assistant. What she really wants to do is unclear, because we see the story entirely through Tom's eyes. He holds Summer on a pedestal, the way that romantic poets did their ladies. Tom is insistent that they are a couple and wants to stay together. His break up with Summer leads him to be depressed, then desperate, then angry. It takes him forever to gain closure.
My own thoughts on their relationship are that Tom was never really in love with Summer, but Summer was close to being in love with him. There are points in time in which Summer seems almost scared, but Tom is so into his own infatuation that he seems to miss everything; if he really loved her, he probably would have played a lot more attention to her. This movie has only one definite problem in that it jumps around too often. They do not leave the numbers on the screen for long enough to tell which day they are actually on.
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