CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 7/17/09

Glory Days

By peter clines

Just when many are ready to write off romantic comedies as a lost cause, two newcomers go back to basics and remind us all that love isn't about funny gags, clever situations…or even happiness.

(500) Days of Summer

Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a failed architect turned greeting-card writer and lifelong hopeless romantic. Summer (Zooey Deschanel), his boss's new assistant, is a practical woman who thinks love is a fairy tale and doesn't want to deal with any sort of relationship labels like "girlfriend" and "boyfriend." Still, as they get to know each other better, there's no denying a certain spark between them. It seems to be the setup for a standard Hollywood romance at first, but the non-linear structure—marked by a spinning day-counter—makes it clear five minutes in that Summer is going to leave Tom's heart in pieces long before the halfway point of this story. Is she really that cold? Is he really a victim? Or have love and lust blinded them both to something that should've been obvious much earlier on? What happens next (and before), as Tom struggles through the ups and downs of this year and a half, becomes an amusing study of their relationship and Tom's expectations versus his reality.

In what seems like a chance parallel, in October of 1998 my two best friends got married, and at their wedding I met the woman I was sure was the love of my life. Abby (not her real name) and I had a fun, passionate relationship and spent a few weeks traveling Egypt together in the spring. That summer I headed off on location to film a little surfing/horror movie, thinking the whole time that it might pay for a ring, and the day before shooting began Abby visited to tell me she didn't think it was working out between us. I was devastated, she moved on, and about 10 years later Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber decided to write a screenplay about it. Oh, sure, you might read a lot of other stories and interviews telling you the film is based on their lives and experiences (mostly Neustadter's, and he's almost proud to admit it), but there's just no way a film could strike so many deep emotional chords unless it was appealing directly to a specific audience—in this case, me.

Or, I suppose, unless Neustadter and Weber are two of the most brilliant and insightful romantic-comedy writers Hollywood has seen in decades.

(500) Days of Summer has been desperate to avoid the romantic-comedy label, and it's easy to see why. Calling it a romantic comedy is like classifying Silence of the Lambs as a slasher flick or Schindler's List as a war movie. This screenplay isn't phenomenal because it has a clever premise or because it hits all the key gags and beats. There aren't any screwball obstacles for Tom and Summer to overcome or horrible secrets they're hiding from each other. Truth to tell, this film breaks just about every genre rule and piece of screenwriting advice that's ever been given. There's a narrator. There are flashbacks. There are story and scene-specific songs. Heck, there's even a musical dance sequence. I have no doubt it's going to going to be that film numerous aspiring screenwriters point to as "but they did and it worked."

No, this film succeeds at so many things, on so many levels, for the simple reason that it's brutally honest. Tom is a normal guy who thinks he's found his soul mate. Summer's a normal woman who thinks she hasn't. The screenwriters know that the real events surrounding a relationship are funny enough without embellishing them, especially when they can be placed side by side because of the script's non-linear structure, skipping directly from a moment at the start of the relationship to the matching one on the opposing downhill slope. A trip to Ikea is fun, flirtatious, and full of promise in those first few days, but six months later those same jokes at the same store have an air of doom hanging over them. Tom can be enamored with certain features and memories of Summer in one scene and irrationally loathe them in the next.

The screenplay is a trip through the memories of a relationship—all of them—and they're memories we've all had at one point or another. We're not laughing at an absurd wager or a good luck charm. We're just laughing at ourselves, in retrospect, and what we felt and thought at the time.

Or, to be more specific, you're all laughing at me.

Bastards.


(500) Days of Summer
Fox Searchlight
Rated PG-13; 95 min.

Peter Clines can often be found ranting on his cleverly named blog, Writer on Writing. His first novel, Ex-Heroes, will be released in fall 2009. He found his real soul mate five years ago and has never been happier. So take that, Abby.



(500) Days of Summer courtesy Fox Searchlight

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