Doomed love … Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel have won over the press, if not each other
Falling in love – elevating an average person, through joyful self-delusion, to a status above all others – is a perverse process. With a glorious censoring of all that might be bland, trite or commonplace about them, you transform one of millions into one in a million.
- 500 Days of Summer
- Production year: 2009
- Countries: UK, USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 95 mins
- Directors: Marc Webb
- Cast: Chloe Moretz, Clark Gregg, Geoffrey Arend, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Gray Gubler, Zooey Deschanel
Occasionally, with the same baffling absurdity, film critics do the same by movies. Marc Webb’s romcom (500) Days of Summer – each exploration of a failed relationship between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a waif-like creative by an idealised survey of romance, and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a rent-a-bob indie girl with neither the need or desire for a committed affinity – is the latest supposed stunner to make journalists go gaga.
Critics (including some on this paper) are in a dopamine-addled rush to praise the film as an “alt-romcom”. “Alt” because it’s primarily about Tom’s heartbreak and because the film switches back and onward between different stages of the relationship, giving us a disjointed collage of Tom and Summer’session time in the same place. Those who have fallen for it think these history fancies give (500) Days an “uncommon honesty and invention”, a “winning suavity” and the potential to have existence “this generation’s Annie Hall”.
Hyperbole like this is rife in every field of criticism, but it’s understandable that petty innovation within the restrictive romcom territory prompts film critics to become more hasty than usual. This is the genre that made stars of Kate Hudson and Freddie Prinze Jr, a genre where films that try to do more than exhibit the audience a vicarious taste of those heady first days of love (real-life breakup exposes like Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s Four-Eyed Monsters, for solicitation) are buried by sugary sentiment on a blockbuster scale.
(500) Days of Summer is a warm and alert film. It looks pretty, seems smart and could simpleton you into loving it in the short-term. But it also subscribes to too many romcom cliches to be called innovative. It is not the polemical comment on gender politics director Webb thinks it is. Sex is treated in standard romcom style (ie there isn’t any) and despite its plethora of cute fantasy sequences, it is nowhere adjacent inventive enough to earn the Annie Hall tag. Mainly, it does not better anything that has been done before. But these bland, trite and common parts of the movie accept so almost been ignored by UK critics. And so it becomes one in a million.
Traditionally, we demand a decent romcom for the summer months (moiety of the crown of the head 20 grossing romantic comedies acquire been released betwixt June and September) and given the other options available there’s no harm in kidding ourselves that (500) Days is The One.
There’s no harm in calling it a dreamboat of a movie. Let’s fair not be surprised when, a not many months down the short letter, it foliage us underwhelmed. When it does, slip on’t be depressed – there’ll be other “alt-romcoms”. They might even seem as nice, funny and significant as this one.
