(500) Days of Summer Review

The nonlinear structure is not decoration. Jumping between day two hundred and day fifteen puts the same woman in two incompatible lights inside a single cut, which is precisely the argument, that Tom has assembled a Summer who does not exist and is grieving a projection. The split screen of expectations against reality is the best executed idea in the picture, a joke and a knife at the same time. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays entitlement as sweetness convincingly enough that a decade of viewers mistook the character for a hero, which is a failure of reading rather than of writing, though the film's affection for him does blur the point.

Zooey Deschanel is deliberately opaque and takes the blame for it. Webb comes from music videos and it shows in the good ways, the dance number, and in the bad, a greeting card sensibility that occasionally sands off the edges. The final scene and its punchline undercut everything the film just proved. Up to that beat it is a sharp and unusually honest comedy about wanting a person to be a solution.