Advance buzz: '(500) Days of Summer'

By Sarah Sluis

Yesterday I saw (500) Days of Summer, the Sundance sensation that's already captivated bloggers and prompted people to count their calendars down to its July 17th release. The sweet, self-aware film--the screenwriters call it "postmodern"--can come off as smug or earnest, though I lean towards the latter interpretation. Fox Searchlight picked up the film, a sure sign that it will follow in the footsteps of the studio's other indie successes, Garden State, Juno, and Little Miss Sunshine.

The movie opens by telling us it's not a love story, even though, well, it kind of is. Tonally, the best comparison is Annie Hall: it's telling you a love story that won't have a happy ending, but somehow makes you leave the theatre thinking about the lobster pot-like moments in the movie, not the break-up.

(500) Days of Summer is incredibly playful stylistically. The morning after Tom's first night with Summer, for example, he checks himself out in the car window and sees Harrison Ford in Star Wars. Everyone moves to his beat, and the scene eventually turns into a dance sequence, and a straight-from-Disney animated bluebird flies through the foreground. So how is this not obnoxious? The sequence seems to come from Tom's subjective point-of-view. He's sentimental, he works for a greeting card company, so it makes sense that he would have these fantasies. Music-video director Mark Webb does a great job keeping the style in check. He avoids hard shifts to fantasy sequences, the kind where the character looks around to see an empty park where a legion of dancers were a moment before, but keeps them slighly loose and open: fun "what ifs" that allow you to share Tom's excitement. Another particularly effective device was a split-screen sequence of Tom attending a party hosted by Summer. The left-hand side shows "Expectations," the right-hand side "Reality," and for a couple minutes we see the scene evolve in different directions. It's a playful style that comes straight from music-videos, but used sparingly, effectively conveys Tom's disappointment. Tom even interacts with the soundtrack. He explains, as "She's Like the Wind" swells in the soundtrack, that he just can't help feeling the music. To me, the style and reflexivity work because Webb is careful to tie each use to Tom's emotions, instead of going willy-nilly just because something would look cool.

With an original, challenging screenplay by Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter, and expert direction by first-timer Webb, (500) Days of Summer is going to be the kind of film people love to love, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised to see one of those Garden State-like backlashes where some get annoyed with the film's self-aware cleverness. It's definitely a film that people will want to talk about afterward, and if the reaction is like the standing ovation the film received at Sundance, it looks like it's going to be a particularly happy summer for Fox Searchlight, which is already on a winning streak with Slumdog Millionaire.