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Thursday, August 06, 2009

Harry meets Sally, Romeo meets Juliet, Sarah meets Todd. It’s all about love, about the sadness of it, the joy of it, the butterflies in the stomach, the rainbows over the tenements. It’s the boy in the alley crying out for Maria, the slob downstairs screaming for “Stellllllllla.” We love true love, don’t we? Apparently we do here in central Maine, where 500 ticket buyers (that’s one for each day of Summer) on one night voted “(500) Days of Summer” Best Of the Fest.
You don’t argue with 500 true lovers.
The voice over warns us that “(500) Days” is not a love story. It’s wrong. It’s an honest love story. It’s not the kind where the girl dies, and the boy wanders off into the rain. Nobody meets on top of the Empire State Building or drinks poison. It’s the story of people you know, maybe even you. It’s about how real love is often like a bus accident or falling down steps or running into a door. Real love, it tells us, is hard work, like making a perfect cherry pie. Sometimes a stone leaps out and breaks a tooth ... or a heart.
Our lovers meet in the work place high above the city.
Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt who socked you in “Brick”) is a gentle, life floater who wants to be an architect, but nobody wants him, so he goes to work writing greeting cards as in “Today You Are a Man, Happy Bar Mitzvah.” He sits in a cubicle jawing with best friend McKenzie (an hilarious doofus Geoffrey Arend.) They party together and work together, and like handsome bumper cars in a carnival ride, go nowhere.
Their boss, an amiable, easy going guy (Clark Gregge “State And Main”) hires an assistant and in walks our set up, our cherry pie, our bus.
She is Summer (Zooey Deschanel with the goog googely eyes and smooth as honey acting style) and Tom walks into a wall, falls down the steps of love and gets his bruises.
But Tom, who believes in perfect love, that everyone has a soul mate, is smacked between the eyes. So after many jumpy starts, a Karaoke bar song and a punch out at the bar, they come together, and we wait for sparklers and fireworks and ups and down, heartbreak and tears and chocolate malt kisses and shower sex. We get all of that, but something else to boot. We get two people with such opposing points of view about life, that it turns the whole scenario on its head.
Summer: “I don’t believe in love.”
Tom: “What’s that mean. It’s love, not Santa Claus.”
Now we know we’re in Los Angeles in 2009, maybe 10 or 11. The days are clicked on the screen like those folding numbers on the old bed clocks. One by one, they unfold, but not in perfect order. They jump back and forth like crazy Tiddly Winks as is the style in new noir amour. First, they’re eating hot dogs and licking each others lips, then they’re having pancakes and she’s dumping him. “We’re like Sid Vicious and Nancy,” Summer whispers.
“I’m like Sid Vicious?” Tom asks.
“No ...”
“I’m like Nancy then?”
And back and forth this goes until we tap the real stuff under all the lip and eye play. There is no cottage in the forest for this princess.
She wants to fight her own dragons, wear her own armour, and Tom is hopelessly tied up in the old Harry met Sally world.
Will these two wonderful kids work it out? How did your first love work out? Did you marry her? Him? Is true love real? Is there a soul mate for all of us? The answer for Tom and Summer is left hanging in the air like smog. There is a happy ending here, but it’s on the third floor of what looks like the old Bradbury Building, and there is sunlight coming through the skylight and something happens that makes us think ... Tom is on to something. If only he doesn’t mess this up.
“(500) Days of Summer” is not a perfect love story and that is what makes it work. It’s real, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who once was the skinny space kid on “Third Rock From The Sun,” is such a good actor, and Zooey Deschanel is such a perfect conundrum in skirts for him, that you really want these two kids to get together so you can go to the wedding. Don’t buy the gifts yet. But, then there is this other scene in the park, overlooking a Los Angeles I don’t remember, that will break your heart.
Scott Neustadter and Mike Weber fill their script with good words and tasty moments, and Director Marc Webb, a new kid on the block, believes in love. I mean, it’s love, not Santa Claus.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.

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