(500) Days of Summer

The biggest problem with this movie is how young and hip it’s aware that it is. Being young and hip isn’t a bad thing for a movie to be, but when the movie rolls around in that youth and hipness, strutting and preening and proclaiming loudly that it is, in fact, very young and hip - then the movie vaults itself into the realms of pretension, and that’s where this one finds itself by the time the credits roll. Matters are not helped by the fact that Summer, the theoretically-enthralling center of main character Tom’s attentions, is in fact just as pretentious as the film itself.

Summer is an extrapolation of the fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants fantasy girl who goes against the grain and isn’t into commitment or marriage and says she doesn’t like labels - the kind of girl that most girls probably think that most guys would rather be with than the more traditional kinds of girls who want to get married and have 2.3 kids and move to the suburbs and buy a criminal SUV that they don’t need and will never use for its intended purpose.

She makes her case right up front, and I have no quibble with her announcing to a potential suitor that she is a particular kind of girl who knows exactly what she wants and does not want out of both relationships and plain old ordinary friendships; but what does not work is the way that Summer apparently believes that her disclaimer gives her license to disregard the feelings of the person she is with at the time. In other words, it’s okay to say that you don’t want something serious; it’s not okay to string someone along as things start to get serious, no matter what you’ve said at the outset - and this is especially so when it’s clear that the other person is falling hard. Summer also employs a Clinton-esque vagueness when it comes to her definition of serious, and what winds up happening is that the relationship is played out entirely on her terms, and Tom has to pretty much take whatever she chooses to give, without having any say of his own in the matter.

No big surprise that a relationship with someone like Summer is pretty much doomed from the word go - on the off chance that the title doesn’t make that clear before we even meet Summer; and it doesn’t leave much space for the story to breathe. Faced with the inherent weakness of the story, the filmmakers are forced to use quirky editing techniques to shake up the pace and the rhythm, so that the film will have a fresh, hip feel and appeal to the intended demographic. Oddly enough, this random, hectic editing actually sort of works - but it’s obviously nothing more than a device employed to attempt to breathe something approaching life into a story that isn’t even close to interesting.

Since the outcome is understood, all that is left to show is how the once-promising relationship collapses; and it becomes clear pretty quickly that Tom is in a no-win situation, because the only prize, to be with Summer for the length of time she winds up thinking is right, is no prize at all for a quasi-romantic who thinks of marriage as the ideal finish line for any relationship that even grazes the bounds of seriousness. So actually, now I think about it, the biggest problem with the film might not be its self-righteous hipness; it might really be that its central character is a selfish, manipulative, obsessive cunt.