(500) Days of Summer (2009)
(500) Days of Summer opens by telling you, in as many words, that it is "not a love story, but a story about love." That is true, as far as it goes, but I would argue the framing is still a little off: this is a story about unrequited love, and, more pointedly, about one man's refusal to accept it.
Marc Webb's film follows Tom, a lovelorn greetings-card writer, and Summer, the woman he falls for, across a deliberately jumbled five hundred days of their on-off entanglement. It was Webb's calling card before he went off to make The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, and it remains his most personal and interesting work. It is also a film I have real mixed feelings about, because for everything it gets right, there is something that sits awkwardly with me.
Here is my problem. Summer tells Tom, clearly and more than once, that she is not looking for anything serious, that she wants something casual, and he agrees to those terms with his eyes wide open. He then, predictably, falls for her, and, this is the part that grates, behaves as though he has been wronged when she holds to the exact boundary she set from the very start.
It is entirely fair for Tom to feel heartbroken. It is not fair for him to push his expectations onto a woman who could not have been more honest about hers. Summer was right to end it, and yet the film's sympathies, its whole wistful, aching tone, sit so squarely with Tom that it risks quietly telling a certain kind of young man that his feelings entitle him to override hers. To be fair, plenty would argue the film knows this, that it is gently critiquing Tom's self-pity rather than endorsing it, and there is something to that reading. But the tone tilts far enough toward him that the message gets muddy.
Which is a shame, because in most other respects it is lovely. That heartbreaking "expectations versus reality" sequence, the screen splitting his hopes from the cold facts of the actual evening, is a beautifully judged piece of filmmaking, quietly devastating in the way only well-earned disappointment can be. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are both excellent, wholly believable as two people who want different things from the same relationship, and the soundtrack, woven through as a shared passion between them, is a real pleasure. Not everything works: Tom's wisecracking friends are grating and add next to nothing. But the central relationship is drawn with real care and honesty.
That central discomfort is, oddly, what makes the film worth chewing over. Watching it, I kept thinking about how readily we romanticise male longing, how the indie-film shorthand of a sad boy and a good record collection can make possessiveness look like poetry. (500) Days is shrewd enough to plant the seeds of that critique, but not quite brave enough to follow them all the way through. It wants to have it both ways: to let you feel every ache alongside Tom while also, quietly, suggesting he brought it on himself. The result is a film that is more interesting as an argument than as an emotional experience.
I would pair it, in a double bill, with Past Lives, which handles the gap between what two people want from each other with far more honesty and far less self-pity from anyone involved. The contrast is instructive.
So, a good film and a well-made one, that I find I like a little less the more I think about whose side it is really on. Three and a half stars, and a charming, frustrating romance worth arguing with as much as watching.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2026-08-28
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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