moviereview colin fraser film movie australia review critic flicks
Boy meets girl and falls in love. Girl just wants to be ‘friends’, breaking boy’s heart and mapping out the 500 days of Tom’s roller-coaster ride from and back to normalcy. If there was a chick flick for blokes – a blick if you will – this is it. A blinding comedy about romance, or more specifically, how love sucks.
Smiths-loving Tom (Mysterious Skin’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt revealing his leading man chops) writes greeting cards until the day Summer (a camera snatching Zooey Deschanel) arrives at work, and within weeks he’s been dropped by a woman who’s just not that into him. That she’s no Isla Fisher styled nut job, nor Tom a hopeless sap, is part of the film’s magic. Well, ok, his emo-infatuation is pretty sappy, but director Mark Webb avoids terror cliché in refreshing the rom-com with a kind of reality, and a male spin.
500 Days of Summer bounces effortlessly along a jumbled timeline of hilariously gritty detail, allowing us to relish in before-and-after moments with merciless hindsight. Witness Tom’s eager embrace of Ringo Starr alongside Summer, now visibly irked by the same goofy joke months later. Webb’s inventive fantasy jumps – a street-dancing production number for Tom’s first shag, or agonising French existentialism after the break up – are moments of utter brilliance.
Where the asinine He’s Just Not That Into You assumed to ply corrective surgery to the rom-com, 500 Days Of Summer actually does. There’s no fairy-tale ending, no back-pedalling, which is as it should be. It neatly forces you to laugh at yourself, though maybe not when others do, which makes it all the funnier. Survive this date move and you’ll survive anything.
// COLIN FRASER
moviereview colin fraser film movie australia review critic flicks