500 Days of Summer

Saw 500 Days of Summer. It was a really cute not-really-love story. It not so much about love as about the idea of love. The story follows Tom, a man with a grossly simplistic view of love (evidence of said simplicity to follow.) Tom falls in love with Summer, the titular girl with markedly different (though also immature) views on love. Tom believes in Disney-style love-at-first-sight True Love but Summer, terrified by the divorce of her parents and self-trained in the powers of suppression, believes love does not actually exist in any sense. This difference hews all the way down to their philosophical outlooks. Whereas Tom wants more celebration of what is beautiful in the world, Summer wants more redemption of what is ugly. Of The Beatles, she loves Ringo best simply because nobody else loves him.

Tom is such a romantic that when he has the sex with Summer for the first time, the world erupts into a full-on musical dance number as swooning pop songs play on the soundtrack. He is great at his facile greeting-card job, but avoids working toward a more artistically demanding job as an architect (which is the dream he seems content to continue dreaming about.) We get to know Summer less, but she reveals a bitter-sweet love of the idea of being strong alone which she recognizes as noble and sad.

Together they attempt a fumbling romance wherein both deny their true feelings of affection out of deference to Summer's insecurities but also suppress their fears and doubts for the sake of Tom's delusions. "Why label it?" they keep repeating about their maybe-maybe-not relationship. This is the epitome of the cutesy quirky romance that would never last a month outside of a rom-com and (not a spoiler) they break up after a year. As sometimes happens in life, they argue without arguing and actually swap sides on the romance issue by the end. Tom is the new-born cynic and Summer the romantic true believer. How interesting.

Everyone in this film has a differently flawed take on romance (except the precocious relationship-guru who is Tom's niece or something.) Tom's friends are a chronically dateless schlub and a man who has been dating the same girl since grade school out of apathetic inertia. The boss at the greeting card company has bought into his own flower-scented bullshit long ago. We are given a wide variety of options on the idea of romance but Tom, our avatar, is left confused.

Coming into this movie, I was kind of hell-bent on liking it (for silly reasons) and I succeeded in this endeavor. It's a more philosophical romance (which isn't even really a romance, as the opening narration warns us.) Don't take your smart girls to this one, guys. The conversations it inspires are dangerous first-date material.