The hero of (500) Days of Summer, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), works at a greeting-card company, where he's a whiz at creating slogans such as "I Love Us." He's given up on his professional dream of becoming an architect but not on his dream of finding true love - and he reckons he's lucked into it when his boss hires a comely, quizzical assistant named Summer (Zooey Deschanel). She likes Tom, she really likes him. But she doesn't believe in love at first sight, or even second or third sight. She thinks she just wants to have fun.
How they find their separate truths provides the trajectory to (500) Days of Summer. How the moviemakers get there is part of what makes the movie a canny, offbeat-yet-commercial lark. Director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber slice the history of the relationship into postcard-size pieces, label these bits according to the particular day in Tom's year-and-a-half obsession, then shuffle them into a cascade of flashbacks or flash-forwards. At one point, Tom becomes so disillusioned with higher feelings that he can no longer come up with clever bromides. He denounces his company and trade for selling customers a bill of goods, because he can't get back into the mood or mind-set for packaging affirmation.
What the filmmakers do isn't that different from the greeting-card company. They've found a novel way of packaging ... not affirmation, exactly, but confirmation of romantic ups and downs common to everyone.
Where the movie winds up is maddening. The film contorts its characters to prove that true love with Mr. or Ms. Right awaits every man or woman patient enough to stumble into it.
But anyone who's suffered anything from crossed signals to crushing disappointment can take solace from Tom's experience. That's mostly a credit to the star. Gordon-Levitt exercises pinpoint control over the expressions that filter into his prematurely weary face. He has a wonderful way of making subtle lifts and drops in mood funny or striking - and making rare moments of triumph exultant.
When he sings and dances through downtown Los Angeles to Hall and Oates' "You Make My Dreams," he catalyzes some of the same happiness that Amy Adams did when she set New York's Central Park aglow in Enchanted.
Deschanel has the undefinable, hard-to-resist charm that Meg Ryan had in her romantic-comedy days. She also boasts a quirkiness all her own, as well as a lyric quality akin to Diane Keaton's. When she sings "Sugar Time" at a karaoke bar, she's nearly as unself-conscious and fetching as Keaton singing "Seems Like Old Times" in Annie Hall.
