Eternal Sunshine meets Annie Hall

Rating: 10/10 (25 July 2009)

This movie is the real deal. There are moments where the joy is so visceral that you have to smile, and moments of despair that cause an opposite visceral pain. Joseph Gordon Levitt's Tom Hanson is you head over heels with a girl who isn't, and if you're a guy you've been there at least once. Zooey Deschanel's Summer Finn is what makes Tom the greeting card writer believe in the love he's been writing about. Summer comes across as someone you want to know and fit into your adolescent fantasies of love, but you never get to know because you're too busy imagining your lives as one big movie. And this is one big movie.
Music is very important here, and the soundtrack is excellent. The relationship is started because of The Smiths "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", and Summer is Tom's light that doesn't go out through those 500 days, even when his meals consist of Whiskey and junk food. Summer loves Ringo Starr the most out of the Beatles, and her favorite song is Octopus's Garden (Not your average John Lennon junkie), yet even when he tries to connect with her by showing her a Ringo solo record its too forced to work.
There are funny moments here too, even in the frequent brooding. On a date with a new girl there is ex-embellishing followed by drunken karaoke that is so horribly real you have to laugh. And you hope that when Tom's boss offers him to write sympathy cards when his love writing turns to expletives it could be real somewhere.
It makes sense that after 500 days of loving Summer something has to come next, and while the rest of the movie looks back at the past the ending is so open you wonder what will happen next in your own life.