In the independent romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer starring, Joseph Godwin -Lewitt and Zoey Deschanel (as Summer) was released in 2009. The romantic comedy-drama film was directed by Marc webb, a director who mostly focuses on music videos. (500) Days of Summer follows a protagonist named Tom Hansen, a subpar card marker who has a romantic fling with a woman named Summer, after watching The Graduate together the fling unexpectedly ends and Tom doesn’t take the break up well. Even trying to win Summer back before she gets married.
In This paper I will discuss various scenes, discuss (500) Days of Summer being a more modern film then the other classical romantic comedies and discuss why their relationship didn’t work. Throughout the film you get a sense of realism from the movie, while watching the film you feel that you have been placed in the shoes of Tom as he goes through the ups and downs trying to make sense of his complicated fling. In the beginning of the film the narrator states that this “is a boy meets girl story. Not a love story”, but the audience is so focused on the ideas of what a romantic comedy is.
A Classical romantic comedy has a humorous storyline with multiple obstacles that pushes their love to the brink, eventually they break up together and by the end of the movie are back together. But this film follows a different beat, it moves to a different drum. At the end of this movie both of these romantic ideals have found someone new, Summer gets married and Tom finds Autumn. This movie displays love in the real world, sometimes you fall in love and for various reasons don’t stay together.
Continuously through the film, I found myself reminiscing on my Summer as the nonlinear structure has the ovie jump from day to day in those 500 days of Summer. In the beginning of the movie music begins to play as a split-screen appears, showing you memories throughout the lives of Tom and Summer before they met, and convincing you that two belong together. The split screen is also shows later in the movie in the scene “Expectations vs Reality”, showing what Toms expectations of the night were and how they quickly changed into reality. Expectations are on the left side of the screen, while reality is on the right. But I found my self multiple times focusing on the expectations hoping that Tom could win Summer back.
This scene is also the scene that changes the viewers mind and makes them realize that the happy ending that we desire as fans of Tom is not going to happen. Another important scene is the scene which Tom describes everything he loves about summer. The scene goes from a medium shot to close up the further in depth he goes about summer looks. This scene makes the audience fall in love with Summer. Ironically it is the same exact scene on day 322, were Tom describes what he dislikes about Summer. In this seen you can tell Tom (protagonist) has detest for his ex lover. You realize that she isn’t right for him.
The scene eventually fades to black before another medium shot is showing Tom yelling on a bus about how he hates the song playing. One way that (500) Days of Summers is different from a classical movie is the time period in which it was made most classical movies were made in Hollywood during the Golden Age, and (500) Days of Summer was made in 2009. Another way it differs normally from a classical film is the fact most classical movies have narrating throughout the whole movie. In (500) Days of Summer the only narrating that happens is in the introduction and in the scene where Tom is in Summers bed.
The characters aren’t the same Tom definitely isn’t a Cary Grant or a Henry Fonda. The last difference is the movie setting a lot of roommates have a connection to the place they are, but this movie just takes place there because its were they meet. While watching the film you think that Summer and Tom are the protagonist, this might because of the split screens showing the two life’s or maybe the introduction describing Summer. The characters through the movie seem polar opposites but after watching the movie again you realize that they are very similar.
Summer doesn’t really know she wants and tells Tom multiple times that she doesn’t want anything serious. Tom thinks that he knows what he wants but Summer isn’t the women for him. The more the movie goes we become more sympathetic for Tom, maybe because he does a 180 has an character and flips from believing in love to thinking summer was right love doesn’t exist. But in Reality he is a just misreads signal. I think that summer was scared of relationship with Tom, she didn’t know how he would act and when he punched the guy in the bar she came to realization that was not what she wanted in a man