Zooey Deschanel is one of my favorite actresses. She’s pretty, in a laid-back way that presents a charming, blue-eyed sexiness. She, and her co-star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are enough to make a success out of a rather zany, often-confusing love story, "(500) Days of Summer."
This is not a symptom of global warming, but the tale of a year and a half in the lives and loves of a girl named Summer Finn, who doesn’t seem to believe in the emotion, and a boy named Tom Hansen, who is simply smitten by the warmth of this Summer.
Director Mark Webb, making his first big-screen movie after a successful run of music videos, takes an interesting, not-always successful, approach to the love story, with flashbacks, jumps forward and a deliberate lack of straightforward continuity. This works well at times, but at others, we’re halfway through the scene before we realize where it belongs in the overall scheme of things.
Finn and Hansen work in a greeting-card company; he writes lyrical nonsense in the Hallmark style but secretly wishes he were an architect. He also has a pair of good pals, nicely played by Geoffrey Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler, and a properly perky younger sister (Chloe Grace Moretz).
The movie takes place in Los Angeles, but Webb and Eric Steelberg, his director of photography, give the city a different, unusual and very special look in their selection of locations and camera angles. A city that usually shows only the fancy shops on Rodeo Drive looks attractive and welcoming.
"(500) Days of Summer" is a light-hearted romp with fine performance by the two leads. It’s the sort of thing we used to call a "summer movie," and it succeeds on several levels.
At several locations.
-Joe