reality

Rating: 9/10 (19 July 2012)

"this isn't a love story, but a story about love", a quote from the ominous narrator which begins Webb refreshing take on the Rom-com genre, presenting a film that dosen't let itself be degraded by the popular clichés, but rather encapsulates the mythologies of the clichéd love story and rips it apart to present, most importantly, a refreshing, realistic and predominate tale of love.
The audience are introduced in hilarious fashion to tom, who is destroying plates from his breakup of his 'love' summer. Immediately you can tell that the film incorporates innovative techniques towards it's narrative structure, as the story is continuously told through the past, present and future shown through the time span of 500 hundred days.
Eventually we learn that tom met summer through her gaining a job at the same workplace, a card factory. Furthermore we learn that tom is quite good at his job which represent his thoughts on love being contributed from the concepts of pop-culture, for instance the ideas of faith and 'soul mates', while quite differently summer thoughts on love are based in a more realistic sense than rather influenced from clichéd ideas.
By using these characters to represent the different concepts of 'love', Webb creates a brilliant comparison between the realistic and idealistic view of 'love'. Webb captures this brilliantly, especially in one scene where tom is walking to summer's house party after they break up, hoping that this event will rejuvenate their love. While tom is walking to summer's the screen is split into two, reality and expectations. This juxtapositions is brilliant because Webb captures a moment shared among many, the hoping that the women you love will come back to you but eventually reality wins. These techniques used evoke the audacious of woody Allen narrative techniques.
There is also two brilliant uses of homages to the graduate and Ingmar Bergman, not just a gimmick but rather a another way of representing the characters emotions. tom and summer are at the theaters watching the graduate and by the ending summer begins to cry, as the ending of the graduate portrayed the characters accessing their values on their relationship and realizing if they truly loved each other, summer cries because she shares the same feelings. The other homage is to the great Ingmar Bergman, tom is at the theater after he has separated from summer, and three sequences from Bergman movies play, representing tom deep depressions.
The end of the movie was brilliant in capturing the essence of love, quite evident in tom and summer's final conversation highlighting the evasiveness of love and it's unpredictably motives.
Finally a movie the depicts love in a realistic process (and funny), despite how off-beat it may seem.