(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing. I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt very much, and the concept and (by and large) the execution of the time-shuttling structure are fine. But much of the content feels too cutesy to me. Robert Kennedy correctly notes the cop-out of the ending in his review:

After spending the entire film deconstructing the typical Hollywood love story, basically reprogramming the audience’s expectations by refusing to allow the couple to succeed, something only hinted at in the disappearing memory play and disoriented editing structure of Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004), but here does the director lose his nerve and retreat back to a safe and formulaic ending, something that could just as easily have been chosen by an audience poll, as it lacks the refreshing originality of the rest of the film.

http://helenshepard.com/cranes/wx.htm

I think the retreat to formula starts earlier than that, actually. The appealingly unreal version of Los Angeles feels a lot like Woody Allen's appealingly unreal versions of New York (Gordon-Levitt = Edward Norton in Everyone Says I Love You), and the greeting-card company setting is all too obviously a movie writer's TV-sitcom-mediated idea of a "workplace." Tom Hansen's best buddies are standard-issue guy-comedy characters. Zooey Deschanel's Summer is in a long line of kooky (to greater or lesser extent) romcom girls. The big musical number looks to be a crib from the method of the Allen film and the (superior) television series Eli Stone, which premiered seven months before filming for (500) Days of Summer began. Tom's corporate breakdown has been done a thousand times. The voiceover narration is, as Robert Kennedy again correctly notes, weirdly stentorian, without offering any reason for being so; by contrast, the rather similar narration in the unknown (and also superior) Canadian indie One Week, with Joshua Jackson, pays off very cleverly indeed in the end.

Despite my sympathy for Gordon-Levitt's Tom Hansen, I couldn't work up any feeling of wistful lost romance because Deschanel's Summer Finn seems calculatingly sadistic from the get-go (or is it just that Tom is remembering her that way? Not clear). It is one thing to acknowledge in your heart of hearts that romance is always contingent and often fleeting; quite another to remind your current squeeze of that unpleasant truth at every possible opportunity. 500 days of that would be way too many.