500 Days of Sucking

So what happens when you genetically cross the material Wes Anderson puts into the shredder after he wakes up from a bender with Diablo Cody with the gimmicks of How I Met Your Mother and the emotional honesty and depth of a greeting card? You get a deformed mutant baby named 500 Days of Summer.

This movie tackles all the tough questions. How can hipsters find love when the world is so like messed up? Does love really even exist man? Are we fated to find happiness? Yawn. Generation Blogosphere’s Annie Hall, this isn’t.

The movie name drops more than a drunk Washington intern at a Congressional happy hour. In short order, the audience gets references to the Smiths, Pixies, Belle and Sebastian, Magritte, and JD Salinger. A note to young writers and directors: next time you want to mention “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in your movie, make sure you don’t. In case the audience is too dense to figure out obscure symbolism, the director, Marc Webb, is sure to pick such songs as “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” and “Here Comes your Man” to really drive his points home.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who gets a mulligan for this pile of garbage because of his role in Brick, plays Tom Hansen, an unhappy young professional who loves Morrissey almost as much as he loves cardigans and skinny ties (Someone tell me Band of Outsiders got some money from this movie). He writes greeting cards for a living which is like a corporation trying to takeover real feelings, you know? As a result, he feels an intense, Sartrean ennui about his world which flavors the misogyny that doubles as his interest in women.

Chloe Moretz plays Rachel Hansen, the blond, wise beyond her years younger sister, who pops up in the film because it worked in Bottle Rocket and wasn’t there a little girl in Little Miss Sunshine? People liked that movie didn’t they? Didn’t Salinger also include young children who somehow see through the phoniness of the adult world? But I digress.

Much like the film, which likes to skip back and forth and show alternate versions and compare reality and expectations and all that stuff because editing makes movies artsy. Except I kept waiting for kids sitting on a couch to pop up and tell Bob Saget to hurry up and get to the point already.

Geoffrey Arend is McKenzie, Tom’s friend, because someone has to be the token funny friend. Except you should be more funny and less token. If you find yourself playing the “What movie is this guy from?” as a way of killing time during the film, let me help you out. The snozzberries do indeed taste like snozzberries.

There’s also a friend named Paul, but really, who cares?

Back to the central questions of the plot. Why is Tom hopelessly depressed? Because that’s how life is, maaaan. Why does he choose a life of suffering and soul-crushing boredom at work? Because apparently architecture didn’t really work out for him, and all college graduates are supposed to be miserable in their professional lives. Or something.

Tom meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who offers him the chance at happiness because as every psychologist will tell you: the surest way to find happiness is to expect other people to provide it for you. The increasingly annoying narrator (Is that the Stranger from The Big Lebowski talking to me?) interrupts to tell us that their story is not a love story, however. Good thing we’re given 500 days to come to the same conclusion then.

But back to Summer. I’d like to spend about a paragraph on Summer’s character as it’s obvious that the scriptwriters didn’t. Apparently, Summer is that special type of girl that makes men look back at her on the bus and give her discounts on apartments (Does she get out of speeding tickets too?). Summer has a cute haircut, cute bangs (helllllooooo Jenny Lewis), and cute outfits that always have bows on them so the male viewer has to keep checking himself so he doesn’t feel like he is transforming into Humbert Humbert. The movie dabbles in the worst type of pornography with the film. Summer is not a character so much as an infantile reflection of male desire. Want me to pick up on your awesome taste in music? Check. Want me to make out with you in the copier room at work just because? Check. Want me to rent porn with you and then try out what we’ve seen? Check. Want me to come to your apartment in the middle of the night after we fight so you can be validated in your feelings that you were right? And the list goes on and on.

Webb focuses on parts of Summer to a disturbing degree. Like a porn director focusing on his actresses’ assets, Webb is sure to highlight Summer’s huge blue eyes and her beautifully sheepish smile every chance he gets. At times, that’s all Summer seems to be, like the Cheshire Cat before it fully forms in front of Alice. All of which is a shame because Deschanel is so damn likeable. If only she didn’t have to look like a baby seal asking to be clubbed for most of the movie.

That’s the point though, right? Summer is Tom’s dream girl so we have to see her through the lens of Tom’s infatuation. Men make the mistake of believing that the women they love must obviously love them back. Except the movie never shows us enough of Summer’s personality to make us care even when the love narrative disintegrates. She remains unexplainable, a mystery in only the most pointless of senses.

Except the writers do try to explain why Summer can’t find love and why Tom desperately needs it. Both Tom and Summer’s parents are divorced. What are the kids to do when mom and dad aren’t alright? The cheap psychology of the writers is horrific in its casual laziness. Although to be fair, Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, the dynamic duo behind this script, were also responsible for that stirring Freudian analysis of modern love known as The Pink Panther 2. Their poor attempts at understanding the ways trauma affects human beings is reminiscent of Rob Zombie trying to explain why Mike Myers kills people in his Halloween remake (hint: he had messed up parents). Horror villains and romantic break ups are scarier when there isn’t a reason that can explain the pain away.

The movie does stumble on some genuinely cute/funny moments along the way as Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel break free from the script long enough for the audience to see what they could be like if given better cue cards. The movie also gets kudos for resurrecting the Penis game from when I was in middle school, and my classmates and I thought it was hilarious.
At some point, the director and writers seem to want to make the point that infatuation is not love, and it’s hard to tell the difference. Fine, except I just made that point in one sentence. To carry a movie, you need more than a vague, overarching point.

But as the cute animations in-between the scenes show us, the seasons begin to change and Tom’s life changes in the same way. It’s sort of like how life is a journey. And how you need to give it 110%. And how a bird in the hand is worth two in the… nevermind. Eventually Tom breaks free from his work after delivering a painfully uninspired rant about greeting cards and love and embarks on finding his future as an architect.

Ultimately the movie tries to side with Tom’s romantic notions of fate against the cynicism of the world as Tom meets a new lady who again likes the same things he likes. He sure is lucky to find women whose interests only mirror his own. The director then taps his audience on the shoulder and smacks them in the face with his symbolism stick when this new lady reveals her name. I’d love to spoil the punch line that the movie has been building up to over its-God-knows-how-long timeframe, but I’ll leave the mystery alive for now.

Unfortunately, the movie’s ending is the more cynical choice. Given the chance to explore the pain of failed relationships and what actually makes love hard to find and harder to keep, Tom gets a new girl and that swagger back in his step. Aren’t you happy for him and that all of those disturbing questions have been swept under the rug?

As you can probably figure out, I wouldn’t recommend watching this movie unless you’re a young male with a chip on his shoulder because your girlfriend totally left you for some other bro. Although as much as I dislike this film, I guess I can recommend it as a date movie. If your significant other does like this film, you know it’s time for a change in the seasons.