Fresh, Thoughtful Rom-Com Challenges One Man's Profound Faith in Love

Rating: 8/10 (16 August 2009)

Many critics are already describing this 2009 indie romantic comedy as this generation's "Annie Hall", but the comparison is apt only to the point where both movies surprise and delight with their persistently unpredictable approaches to well-worn themes of love gone awry over the course of a relationship. I still don't think that this film, directed by feature-film neophyte Marc Webb and scripted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webb, achieves the emotional resonance of the earlier Woody Allen classic, probably because there have been so many attempts in the intervening three decades to copy it, but this fresh-faced film is certainly not without its moments of charm and genuine revelation about the principal characters.
The time-jumping story follows the course of the rocky, five-hundred-day relationship between two LA-based twenty-somethings – Tom, an underachieving greeting-card writer who has not quite given up on his dreams to become an architect, and Summer, a recent Michigan transplant who is not looking for any long-term commitments. She is definitely the object of his growing affection, while she remains steadfastly a Holly Golightly-like fantasy figure. For a stretch, the movie feels somewhat facile and light-hearted in sketching the beginning of their courtship with the halted dialogue after a drunken karaoke night and a walk through IKEA as they pretend to be happy marrieds. The plot gets more interesting as their defining moments become jumbled from Tom's own sense of recollection, including Webb's use of film-school gimmicks like a split-screen treatment of a real-versus-imagined reunion and full-on tributes to Fellini and Bergman movies. The film's funniest bit is also the most unoriginal – a post-coital musical number set to Hall & Oates' "You Make My Dreams" that looks a lot like the Dr. Pepper "Be a Pepper" commercial from the 1970s.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("Brick") really comes into his own as Tom, providing a thoughtful depth to his portrayal of the likable but pained protagonist. As Summer, Zooey Deschanel has the more difficult role since we don't get a view of her inner feelings the way we see Tom's. However, she uses her big blue eyes and malleable, off-kilter manner to great effect here. More importantly, she makes Tom's emotional free-fall completely understandable. Other roles are filled out more predictably – Chloe Moretz as Tom's too-wise-for-her-years younger sister Rachel, and Geoffrey Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler as his two semi-slacker buddies. Still, this movie feels a lot fresher than most of the Hollywood product out there thanks to Webb's prodigious approach. He uses the ambiguous ending to Mike Nichols' "The Graduate" very well here, and there is a nice appreciation for Los Angeles architecture capped by a last scene in the legendary Bradbury Building.