Achingly Beautiful, the misery of one's love lost - love remembered.

Rating: 8/10 (1 August 2009)

I don't regularly comment on movies, but this has a personal accord with me.
My girlfriend of one year broke up with me the day before I went to watch this film, as promised.
That being said, Tom (Joseph Gordon Levit) embodies my apathy and frustration in every mannerism. He allows the audience to feel his pain and disappointment. Tom is a man with boyish ideals, coming to terms with the grief of rejection. He teaches her how one loves, yet she never learns to except and give as selflessly. Probably because, as I and Tom have painfully learned, you can't teach or bequile someone as you would a child into doing love 'properly.' And sometimes, true love dies, and no sea of tears can change that.
Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel, is fun, beautiful and selfish. Undoubtedly the villain, the film seeks a reversal of standards; the male is now being preyed upon.
Is Tom naive? or is Summer a cruel and self interested girl?
The only thing that really bothered me was the director's incessant need to punctuate scenes of emotional substance with cliché romantic comedy relief. He already broke custom, why conform?