(500) Days Of Summer

Director Marc Webb's sly, classic in the making rom-com, (500) Days Of Summer, penned by Scott Neustadter Michael H. Weber, does for 2009 what Annie Hall did for 1977: it takes the aging, unimaginative romantic comedy genre into a new era with wit, insight, and an awareness of all that has come before. The film drifts whimsically along through a scrambled timeline as it follows the 500 days of the on-again-off-again relationship between hopeless romantic Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and cynical commitment-phobe Summer (Zooey Deschanel). That those actors and this film so neatly fit into the sub-category of "indie" style can seem a mockable and trite quality but the film itself is a friend and foe to formula, weaving predictability hand-in-hand with nuance. The film re-enacts so many film patterns we have seen a million times before and then magnificently departs from them at precisely the right moments.

In short, this is a thoroughly modern romantic comedy that is hyper-reflexive, ADD friendly, and a definite mix of half-serious homage and thoroughly sincere reimagining. It gives us all of the elements that we expect but not necessarily in the order we expect them, or in the manner that is traditional. Best of all, the movie is a joy to watch from start to finish. It's a fresh and wonderfully buoyant film experience complete with a goofball dance routine and geniusly comic sequences such as the semi-climactic Expectations vs. Reality montage in which we see an important scene played out simultaneously as fact and fiction. These touches help carry the film into a higher echelon of entertainment, the kind that genuinely starts trends and shakes up standards. The film dares to be visually adventurous, editting its narrative out of sequence and adding numerous artistic flourishes that could easily have been squelched in favor of commerciality. Moreover, it captures honest emotions, namely a sense of longing and frustration/addiction to artifice that feels distinct to this generation. Hopefully it will inspire others to expand the rom-com palette to include smartly conceived visual and narrative concepst so often not even considered when assembling a formula feature. It is that kind of ingenuity which makes this most certainly the greatest romantic comedy so far this year, and perhaps even so far this decade.

Grade: A