The Long Take: The Missing Days of Summer

15 years later, my relationship with (500) Days of Summer is about as messy as the movie.

(500) Days of Summer is a relentlessly misunderstood movie. It’s centred around Tom Hansen’s romantic journey with Summer Finn, the assistant to her boss at a greeting card company. Tom falls for her, because she’s the enigmatic human version of the soundtrack he plays on his MP3. But Summer is not interested in him, nor does she have a long-term relationship on her mind. When they hook up, Tom was certain that she was the one, even if Summer did not respond to him. The film is structured in non-linear fashion, piecing together the red flags that Tom did not catch.

At the time of its release, Marc Webb’s directorial debut was hailed by critics as the subversive rom com that flips many tropes its genre peers took on. Considering that the romantic comedy was very saturated in the 2000s, it’s a bold claim to make, and an independent movie made for $7.5 million very easily fits the expectation. The film is hardly romantic nor that comedic, but it is a coming of age story. 

I had multiple experiences with this film. When I first watched this, midway through high school, it was one of the first ‘great’ movies I saw, when I started taking film more seriously. Not only did one can identify with Tom - his tastes in music and movies, the preferences for a romantic partner - but the twists and turns made it feel witty and alive. Multiple viewings later, I hated it. I thought it was witless and phony, that I elaborated my thoughts in it on Letterboxd (that review remains one of my most popular posts there). Now, 15 years later, it seems like most people retrospectively had a similar view as mine, in a sense that it was about as messy as the story could get.   

And then you realize. (500) Days of Summer didn’t change. I did. 

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The first interpretation is that Summer was a hellraiser to Tom. To arrive at this conclusion, you’d wholeheartedly accept its surface function: that Tom is a main character, and you’re automatically sympathetic to most of the choices he makes and thinks they are just to maintain his romantic illusions. Given that it’s from Tom’s point of view, we are only seeing a limited perspective of Summer. After all, Summer was artificial, and he has to know this himself, after ignoring many warnings from her, his friends and his younger sister. 

But as one matures, they encounter the second interpretation, strongly supported by Joseph Gordon Levitt, which is that Tom was in the wrong. Tom, being a craftsman of taste - he loves arthouse movies, mopey anthems - sees love in the way that is no different to a lot of men, who treat women with the most pornographic sense (he did describe her looks and Summer did say she was called an anal girl). If she likes The Smiths, then it’s an affirmation to get her. This is seen, by proxy, as the perspective of Summer. She’s quite cynical of romance and its fateful consequences. So when Tom miserably defends Summer against a fratty guy in a suit getting her a drink, she’s visibly offended that he did it on her behalf. Worse, she sees this as an extension of him controlling her. 

All of this is by design and it is why the third phase clarifies a lot of things. As you lay out each day, one by one, you understand the circumstances surrounding Tom. Once his superficial philosophy on love slowly disintegrates and reveals itself to be as false, it also demonstrates its roots from beginning to end. 

One of (500) Days of Summer’s main influences is The Graduate, and the narrator states that Tom mistook the final seconds of that film as a happy one. In there, Elaine Robinson and Benjamin Braddock escape from her wedding and the uproar of the crowd. They enter on a bus, only for that thrill to quickly fade, letting uncertainty set in. It’s reinstated again, as a precursor to the breakup, when Tom and Summer sat down to watch the film, and it left her devastated. Did that turn her against him? Probably, but it definitely left a profound impact on her approach to life. The Graduate is a coming of age story, particularly for people who are in the midst of young adulthood and are still uncertain.

Summer’s cynicism does have its downsides and the film is also aware of that. As much as Tom’s outlook is childlike to a fault, it does make herself look naïve and selfish, when accounting for her contradictions. While it masks her uncertainties, it does make some of her choices questionable, like making the first move on Tom at the printing room, or leading him on, for the sake of having a casual fling. 

Emotional devastation has been the film’s biggest strength. The scene in which the film weighs Tom’s expectations and reality is an example of taking advantage of the right circumstances at the right time: a split screen of the two situations, and right as Regina Spektor’s Hero reaches its crescendo, you feel Tom collapsing and failing. It is also at that point that he has to evolve out of his hollow shell.

The film is also owed to the excellent performances from Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Deschanel was made for the role, and she was known to be the deadpan hipster dream girl. (at the time of the film’s release, I remember reading a poll of Most Desirable Women by a website named AskMen and Zooey Deschanel was described as “Megan Fox for the hipster set). Summer was unfairly maligned as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (including myself) that was quite common with the type of indie flicks, but she’s not there to relinquish her male partner’s malaise. The character carries her own agency that could only be realized in the climax and be open about her humanity once she reunites with Tom. Since I went through the second phase, I had a bad impression of Joseph Gordon Levitt. Levitt’s build had restricted him to play the mopey, neurotic wimp (my suspicions were confirmed when he played the same personality in 50/50, the indie comedy about getting cancer, but uninteresting). Here, is an awareness charm here that makes him interesting. He talks like he has no idea of what he is doing and his body language is incredibly defensive.

(500) Days of Summer was released in a sea of independent dramedies featuring urbane, lonely millennials. I have strong reservations against those kind of movies, as the acting is often stilted, the writing and direction is aesthetically uninteresting and it paves a way for low artistic ambitions by relying too heavily on nebbish awkwardness. But compared to Garden State and Elizabethtown, (500) Days Of Summer does a better job in its intentions. It has a standout colour scheme and the soundtrack - which includes Regina Spektor, The Smiths, The Temper Trap and… Patrick Swayze? - is well-timed and more listenable. But it pales in comparison with the likes of Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which are interested in exploring human relationships and its nuances, and more critically, they’re stylistically punchy. (500) Days of Summer, in spite of its non-linear narrative, and its hidden layers of (one) meaning, feels very basic.   

It isn’t enough to justify every intent behind the film without evaluating its execution. Both Tom and Summer remain two-dimensional characters and are unlikeable due to their impulse. It is littered with many tropes Webb and Webber try to subvert; instead, it reinforces the genre’s status quo, whether it’s Tom’s guy friends who give him the vapid advice. (500) Days of Summer is described by screenwriter Scott Neustadter as a revenge movie, and has said that Summer was based on a woman he once dated, (in the opening sequence with calling Jenny Beckman a “bitch,”). If that’s the case, then it undermines the fact that it should be a cautionary tale that you shouldn’t fall in love with the “idea” of a person. 

The ending, which sees Tom finding work in architecture, after reuniting with Summer briefly cements how frustrating it is to watch the film, as it covers its problems like a rug hiding an uncleanable stain on the floor. He meets a woman who is competing for a position and her name turns out to be Autumn, with Tom breaking the fourth wall with a self-satisfied smile on her face. Then the days counter reset. Either the character or the screenwriters have learned nothing from their experiences, or are taking away the wrong lessons. Not that you need to be a fully realized person to earn love (I’ve known some who weren’t at that stage before they found the one), but he may still love the idea of a person and then get disappointed, and the whole cycle repeats itself. 

Ultimately, it’s the story of a particular thirty-year old boy, rather than the person writing this retrospective. I’ll admit that, for as annoying the film can get and how it ends up missing the mark numerous times, I still find some value for this film. Young men are seen as unambitious, unloved and short-sighted for as long as time exists. I see myself in them, the same way I see myself in Tom. (500) Days of Summer is not the first nor last film to challenge tired cliches associated with the romantic comedy genre. They don’t need to be romantic, nor comedic and this one doesn’t embody those feelings with open arms. But they do need to be honest about itself and Webb and co are as honest as it gets. And maybe, that’s all it has to do.