Harold Pinter for the Generation Y jetset

Rating: 10/10 (7 August 2009)

Did Tom Hansen(Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) misread "The Graduate" not once(as a wide-eyed child raised on the songs of Morrissey/Marr), but twice(as a self-deluded adult still wallowing in teenaged idealism), who in both instances, gets the counterfactual notion that Benjamin Braddock(Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine Robinson(Katherine Ross) will end up together, contrary to the young couple's reticence at the back of the bus. After watching the high romance of Ben's glass-banging at the church that was holding Elaine's wedding, Tom saw what he wanted to see, and never reorientates himself to the calm after the commotion, in which the moment of undying love quickly dissolves by the time both the graduate and the runaway bride find their seats. And then he might have played something by The Smiths as reinforcement of his identification with the wildly-in-love Benjamin. Tom was young. But years later, in a greeting card company boardroom, Tom wakes up from his romantic stupor, and accuses, in particular, pop music and film, of conspiring to break our hearts with an idealism that doesn't transcend its artistic boundaries. Before this epiphany, however, Tom meets Summer(Zooey Deschanel) and he loves her, just flat out loves her. And even though a grown man should know better, Tom is still a hopeless romantic, so he projects the crazy adolescent love expressed in a couplet like "and if a double-decker bus crashes into us/to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die"(from The Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out"), onto the bus that transports the distracted couple at the end of the Mike Nichols film, when the truth couldn't be any more self-evident. This misreading of "The Graduate" comes back to haunt Tom, late in "(500) Days of Summer", as life imitates art, in a scene where the greeting card writer finds himself on a bus with Summer after attending a wedding(a co-worker's wedding). With the memory of having seen "The Graduate" with Summer still fresh in his mind, Tom confuses expectations with reality, and takes her willingness to sleep against his shoulder as a sign of reconciliation, of love. It's the movie in his head where Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross live happily ever after, come to life; somehow ignoring the fact that "The Graduate" had made Summer weep and was the catalyst for their break-up.
Since "(500) Days of Summer" is devised in a non-linear fashion, when Tom shows up at Summer's party, the audience is unaware that he had a second chance at rectifying his original childhood interpretation of 1967 love, incidentally, the summer of love, as the diegesis goes split screen, expressing in formal terms, Tom's expectations(shaped by his naive readings of "The Graduate"), and Tom's reality(shaped from a corrective reading that his adult self never made, which would comply with the consensus reading of "The Graduate"). Fueled by love songs from the "creme de la creme" of post-punk bands who rose to prominence during the mid-to-late-eighties, Tom envisioned Ben and Elaine as soulmates, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they were not built to last. To him, "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" is practically a commandment that lovers stay in love. But at the shindig, Summer breaks this commandment irreparably, when Tom sees his one and only showing off her engagement ring to a friend, causing the "reality" side to push the "expectations" side out of frame, right to left. It's the same direction that Ben takes on the moving airport walkway, famously, in the opening scene of the Nichols film, famous because most filmic movement goes left to right. Now that Tom has finally grown up, he stops espousing his belief in fate and predestination that lives inside the pop song, which had kept him in a perpetual state of adolescence. Now he knows why Summer cried at the end of "The Graduate". Elaine didn't love Ben. If Tom conceded the truth on this matter, he'd have to admit that Summer didn't love him too. Played by Zooey Deschanel, it's plain to see why Tom had kept his Smiths goggles on to induce a state of vertigo, because who would want summer to end with a woman like that?