Foreword: This is a home assignment of Grade 8 English class - to write about your favourite movie. I watched this movie with Mew last year and honestly felt it rather boring ... until I happened to read her review. She really opened my eyes to how shallow I’d been and how mature our kids have become nowadays. I could not even recall if I ever gave a thought about these topics when I was at the university, let alone in my teenage.
500 Days of Summer
(Synopsis:) “Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t. This post-modern love story is never what we expect it to be — it’s thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn’t quite go where we think it will. When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend Summer dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days “together” to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life.”
This is hands down my favorite movie ever—which is saying a lot since I’m usually so critical towards TV and film. Just like all great movies out there, both the synopsis and trailer doesn’t do it justice. The synopsis gives us an impression of yet another “special” love story that ends in a happily-ever-after setting, where the guy gets the girl and meanwhile, discovers his true self or gets the job of his dreams or some crap like that. The trailer, unfortunately, wasn’t any better. Its verdict of this movie comes off as fluffy and light-hearted with no underlying message to be learned from; when in truth, it is anything but that. There are lessons upon lessons tied up in this spectacular 95 minutes long film.
Spanning across the 500 days that Tom and Summer spent together, we jump between past and present along with the heart-broken Tom who is re-evaluating how he saw both Summer as a person and Summer in their relationship. The more he indulges himself into the past, it is as if a whole different light has been casted on their time spent together making him realize little by little, why Summer had so abruptly broken off their relationship when he thought it was going so well. (quote worth mentioning here, Rachel [Tom’s little sister] to Tom: “Look, I know you think she was the one, but I don't. Now, I think you're just remembering the good stuff. Next time you look back, I, uh, I really think you should look again.”)
In the first paragraph, I stated that there were many lessons to be learned from this movie on which I will dive deeper in now. To be completely honest with you, I didn’t love this movie the first time I saw it. I was so focused on the general plot I didn’t catch the foreshadowing or symbolism or even, lessons that Marc Webb, the director, had cunningly placed in there. 500 Days of Summer proves to be one of those few rewatchable movies that only gets better and better the more times you watch it. Also, what’s so interesting about this movie is that it can be seen by two perspectives. One is Tom’s and the other is Summer’s.
The controversy surrounding this movie was that so many people hated the character Summer the first time they watched the movie (me included). *Spoiler (so you can understand my point better): Tom and Summer do not end up together. Summer ends up marrying another guy some months after the break-up. * I was left just as Tom was: bitter and confused. Tom gave his all to her, and Summer ends up marrying some other guy? I finally realized, after re-watching the movie, that that was not the point nor the lesson of the movie at all.
The dawning realization hit me when I realized what Tom thought was love wasn’t love at all. Of course, you can’t outright blame him, since his character was considered the hopeless romantic, but that is no way to uncondemn him completely. Also, I just realized the reason for why Summer was such a hated character must be because the directors were amazing at really helping you sympathize with Tom’s character. That being said, once you closely pay attention, you actually begin to see the selfishness of his character. He developed a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projected all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. Tom thinks that Summer is the key to his happiness: to find a partner who’s solely focused on them. But that’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person. Tom idolized Summer Finn. He fell in love with the idea of Summer, not Summer herself, and got his heart broken. This is why I love this movie so much. This is not a love story, this is a story about love.
This movie also introduced me to the popularized term in films and books, the cliché ‘manic-pixie-dream girl’ syndrome. I can get deeper in this topic as well, but then we would be here ‘till Christmas, so I’ll spare you by giving you the Urban Dictionary definition: “A Manic Pixie Dream Girl or MPDG, is a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin after seeing Elizabethtown. It refers to "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." A pretty, outgoing, whacky female romantic lead whose sole purpose is to help broody male characters lighten up and enjoy their lives.” This movie, not only is anti-manic-pixie-dream girl, it even parodies that cliché! It shows Summer as her own person with her own life along with all the dreams and goals and troubles she must take care of. She is in no way, shape or form, existing solely to cater Tom’s ego.
Not guilty at all, I am proud to say that I’ve watched this movie at least 7 times already. Not only with a jarring and eye-opening denouement, this movie has one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard along with one of the most pleasing and stunning visuals in cinematography I’ve ever seen. I give major respect to the brilliant director, Marc Webb to have created this breath-taking masterpiece. It is so incredibly well thought-out and painstakingly detailed in such length that Webb made sure to have the color blue only appear in shots that included Summer, and discarded any traces of blue when she wasn’t present.
Finally, for the ending of this movie, I thought it was absolutely perfect. Hopeful yet realistic, promising yet bittersweet; it was the perfect conclusion for such an impactful story in such a short amount of time.
