(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Director: Marc Webb

Producers: Jason Novack, Jessica Tuchinsky, Mark Waters, Steven J. Wolfe

Writers: Scott Neustadler; Michael H. Weber

Actors: Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Zooey Deschanel; Geoffrey Arend; Matthew Gray Gubler; Chloë Grace Moretz

Cinematography: Eric Steelberg

Music: Mychael Danna, Rob Simonson

Rated: PG-13 ( sexual material and language)

Running time: 95 mins.

      Love and architecture in downtown L.A.

      The movie begins with a statement warning the viewer that “this is not a love story”. But that’s definitely not so; it is a love story--- of sorts. It’s a romance involving a young man, a young woman and the city they live in. The young man, Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is a drop-out architect working for a greeting card company; the young woman is Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), the recently hired assistant to his boss; and the city is Los Angeles, or more exactly downtown L.A. where they both live and work. 

        Tom is a romantic who believes in destiny and a love that is meant to be. Summer takes a more rational, unemotional view of the subject; in fact, for her love does not exist; one just satisfies one’s likes and needs, and when these needs are filled one moves on. Through the course of the movie, which is viewed almost entirely from Tom’s perspective, we follow the two in their up and down relationship on a day by day basis, but not in any chronological order. The 500 days appear as apparently haphazard episodes, each highlighting an event bringing the couple together or driving them apart. When the relationship chills, Tom gets advice as to how to handle the situation from his two buddies MacKenzie (Geoffrey Arend) and Paul (Matthew Gray Gubler), but his main advisor is his precociously wise little sister Rachel (Chloë Grace Moretz). The friends’ opinions are of little help, but the sister’s is spot on--- “get over it and move on”. In the end, both Tom and Summer do move on, but in unexpected ways, proving that love is never what you expect.

          (500) Days of Summer  is director Marc Webb’s first feature film. His past work was in music videos; and he uses this experience effectively in several instances. There’s a delightful Bollywood-style fantasy dance number to Hall and Oats’ You Make My Dreams involving Tom and passersby between the court buildings in Civic Center Plaza. In another, at an epiphany moment for Tom, the L.A. skyline background to the scene is turned into an architectural impression drawing. He also inserts a talking heads essay segment on love, and a few fantasy foreign movie spots emphasizing Tom’s dejection and depressed state of mind. But the best touch is a sequence where Tom goes to a party hosted by Summer thinking they’re on the way to renewing their relationship, only to find out otherwise. Webb uses a spilt screen: one showing Tom’s high expectations, the other--- reality.

         The city serves as a background to this realistic “love story” and L.A.’s architecture  is highlighted throughout. Tom does his serious thinking on a bench in Angels Knoll Park, the last vestige of undeveloped land on Bunker Hill. From this vantage point he seeks inspiration by gazing at the architectural gems of a century before still standing between the Hill and City Hall. On their dates Tom and Summer visit the Fine Arts Building and the Music Center. Tom meets his friends, and Summer, at the Redwood Bar & Grill on Second Street. He works at New Hampshire Greetings Card Company on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from where he lives. He and Summer leave town from Union Station to attend a wedding. The wedding was filmed at Point Fermin in San Pedro. And the glorious Bradbury Building is the location for the last scene, a scene that restores Tom’s romantic belief in fate and proves one should never regret the loss of Summer---for Autumn may prove to be better.

         What this movie points out about today’s Los Angeles is that Tom, Summer, and their friends are examples of the young millennials who have reclaimed downtown and the entire east side of L.A. as their own. The once forgotten and abandoned sections of the original city are coming alive again after decades of neglect. They’ve brought new investment into an area that thirty years ago was a no man’s land for most Angelenos, unless they happened to work there--- but they would never think of living there. With the investment have come cafés, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, and a social life that hasn’t existed there since before the Second World War. And with these social amenities have come the music events, art walks, and street fairs that now occur on a regular basis. But most all they’ve brought back creativity to a district that was dying; artists and musicians now populate an area, the Arts District, formerly the Warehouse District, that not long ago was a suburb of Skid Row. 

           It may not have been Marc Webb’s intention to spotlight any of this when he chose L.A. as the location for the story he wanted to tell (the original location for the story had been San Francisco), but his choice was a good one.

          Note: This movie bears interesting similarities to Jacques Demy’s Model Shop(1969) released exactly forty years earlier. They would make a good double feature. See my essay on Model Shop  at a future date.