Smells like 20-something angst: 500 Days of SummerBy Juliette Tang
Wednesday night at the Sebastiani Theatre in downtown Sonoma, the Sonoma International Festival kicked off with a showing of 500 Days of Summer, an indie-romance starring the lovely and blue-eyed Zooey Deschanel and the surprisingly-cuter-as-he-ages Joseph Gordon-Levitt, alum of 3rd Rock. Directed by music video director Marc Webb, the cloyingly sentimental movie makes liberal use of a twee 'supermix' of popular college radio love songs, which included The Smiths, Regina Spektor, Doves, Belle & Sebastian, Black Lips, Spoon, Jack Penate, and Feist -- "Mushaboom," during a wedding scene, no less. About an unstable romance between two scruffy, marginally hip 20-somethings in Los Angeles, the movie was a hit with a Sonoma audience, who clapped and cheered after the showing. It ought to be mentioned, though, that this audience inexplicably also loved the Comcast commercial that played during the previews, clapping and cheering after that as well.
Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt play Summer and Tom, two people who look like everything that protagonists in 'quirky' emo rom-coms are supposed to look like. She has long wavy hair with bangs, wears opaque tights, ballet flats, and little cardigans over vintage dresses. He appears to have a large collection skinny ties, sweater vests, Pumas, and messenger bags. Tellingly, in one scene, Tom actually admits that he fell in love with Summer at first sight, because she looks like what his dream girl would look like. Called 500 Days of Summer because Tom's relationship with summer lasts - hah - 500 days, most of those 500 days are wasted away by Tom, who is either pining after Summer, or subsequently whining when their whirlwind relationship ends abruptly. The film's message is that Tom's grave was entirely self-dug because he didn't recognize the warning signs. As viewers, we're left wondering why we should feel sorry for Tom at all if the mess was of his own making.
Tom is so enthralled with Summer's off-beat indie-ness that he doesn't even notice that she is completely demented. For starters, Summer likes to shriek the penis game (you know, that game you played in grade school cafeterias, where you and a friend said "penis" over and over again in It's not easy watching a histrionic crybaby for 95 minutes, but for all Tom's pitifulness, it's even more uncomfortable watching him become a drunk mess of a histrionic crybaby. Problems with the plot aside, my beef with this film is that it seems to think such behavior is okay, or at least, somehow redeeming. That if people can be so weepy and melodramatic, it's somehow saving them from the worse fate of ambivalence, or worse yet, cynicism. In no way am I espousing that we shouldn't be able to feel strong emotions like grief and loss, or that that there's anything shameful about a broken heart. What I want to know is why we as an audience should care about a dude who 'fell in love' with a girl because he could project his emo boy fantasies on her, and why we should empathize how overboard crazy he gets when she leaves him, when it turns out he never really knew her at all?
500 Days of Summer originally premiered at Sundance and will be out in theaters this August.
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