500 Days of Summer (2009) is as warm and tantalizing as the season that it takes its name from.  And just like the finest season, you’ll treasure it as a rose-palette recollection.  The flick mixes rapture and melancholy with a light heart. 

500 Days of Summer, directed by Marc Webb, features Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) recounting his five-hundred-day relationship with the wonderfully whimsical Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel).  The film opens with a narrator’s voice-over:  “This is a story of boy meets girl.  But you should know upfront, this is not a love story.”  No, Tom and Summer are not dating.  They do everything that couples do, but a couple they are not.  Their conflict is a matter of perception – and Webb’s movie is about perception.  Men and women simply see the same things differently.  At first, this truth means wild happiness for Tom.  Later, it blindsides him.  The difference between Tom and Summer’s perception of their relationship becomes an unhappy dichotomy.  The former is wholly smitten; the latter wants to “keep it casual.”  Tom remembers the days of his Summer love just as we all remember human relationships: in a nonlinear haze filtered by emotion.

Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel

Even with those emotions flying about, 500 Days is therapeutically refreshing.  It’s refreshing as a romance flick, it’s refreshing as a comedy, it’s refreshing as a study on gender contrasts.  The film hinges on the performances of Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.  They deliver.  Levitt possesses tremendous charisma.  He embodies the affable, love-struck young guy.  He knows that life might disappoint.  Summer just makes it so sweet that he forgets.  And Deschanel is simply inimitable.  The nuances of her acting set the character apart.  She makes Summer what women of Hollywood love yarns are not: alluring in ways genuine, whole, and mysterious.  It’s no wonder that Tom fell hard.

And Webb has a knack for uniting disparate film elements.  500 Days has a song-and-dance here, a documentary-style session there, droll pop-culture humor in between.  The soundtrack, the dialog, and the cinematography work so well because they unite.  The union has an exceptionally distinctive tone.  Each feature comes together with rare finesse.  Webb’s movie is a movie with a soul.  Like Tom and Summer’s relationship, that cinema-soul is offbeat and singularly engaging.

This is a lovely little film.  500 Days of Summer is honest, clever, and riotously comical.  It has spirit.  It has unflustered personality.  It has an inexplicably magnetic draw – just like love.