Release Date: July 17, 2009

(out of 4)

"(500) Days of Summer" is a film with five hundred seeming replays or a number close to it. Very few romance films are this nimble and supple – full of those moments that occupy relationships between smart, inquiring and contemplative twenty-something’s. This is what happens when the writing is snappy and the directing is swift. Most of the movie goes right – it’s very confident and self-assured with itself for certain.

Notice that I called it a “romance” film. I think it’s because it is inaccurate to classify this as a romantic comedy or a dramatic romance. But the film, with its’ spontaneous detours through dream sequences, a French New Wave impromptu, black & white snapshots, attention-grabbing diagram drawings, a split screen with a fake-and-real scheme, and a buoyantly choreographed musical number – is a whimsical romance. The film is breezily photographed and the cutting has a pop rhythm. It moves fast and exuberantly, but also smartly.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) replays his 500 up-and-down days with the girl he loves. Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is the girl he was meant to spend his life with, he believes. Tom is a greeting-card writer who gave up on his dreams of being an architect, and Summer is the new office assistant whom he’s smitten with the moment he lays eyes on her, but word is out that she’s a bitch. He steers his eyes away for three days until he can’t help but notice her. On day four, they share the elevator and bond over The Smith’s song “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” An employee outing taps two karaoke performances by first Summer, then Tom. Then Tom’s drunk friend tells him, “Why don’t you just tell her you like her?”

An office romance begins, but the film avoids sitcom auto-piloting. It has the kind of unpredictable giddiness of the kind of Cameron Crowe film before Cameron Crowe lost his magic. The hook is that the two lead characters are unorthodox opposites. Reversing stereotypes, Tom is a sensitive and romantic one with grandiose ideas about how love completes us. Summer is uninterested in having a boyfriend and enjoys her independence. While they’re dating, Summer insists they are just friends. By the time they realize they are a couple, they are having quarrels like Sid & Nancy.

Well not quite, but that’s how Summer describes the two of them. The film slides back and forth in time, using flash title cards informing us which day they’re in. They’re all Tom’s scattered memories, shuffling between day 32 and day 185 and then back again to an earlier time. It’s like a sunnier version of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but by day 320 watch as Tom’s face begins to droop. Love is schizoid, isn’t it?

It only feels like the last 100 days are redundant, but that’s love – you stick around past all reasons of insanity. Not much goes wrong with “Days of Summer” yet it could have entirely disposed of scenes of Tom receiving expelled advice from his pre-teen sister which are moments that scream of degenerate rom-com sappiness. Another unmerited distraction: Tom also has a gratuitous blow-up on the false magnanimousness of the greeting cards his company composes. Most of the time, the film is a jaunty affair that is more sweet and divine than real life. I would love to see the movie again, but with some edits.