"This is not a love story," intones a voice-over at the beginning of Marc Webb's smart, funny "(500) Days of Summer," and we learn in the course of the film that this nameless voice is both right and wrong.
It's the story of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and, yes, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), two young adults who meet and fall in love, as so many do.
But there's nothing conventional about "(500) Days of Summer," a fresh July breeze among recent (and mostly stale) romantic-comedy offerings. Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, it careens back and forth along a year and a half of Tom and Summer's lives, zipping us from late in the relationship to early and back again.
Its visual style is inventive, ranging from a sunny dance number in a park (set to Hall & Oates' bouncy "You Make My Dreams Come True") to a split-screen depiction of expectation vs. reality to a scene that simply becomes a drawing to be erased. And it has, at its core, chemistry that jumps off the screen into our laps: From the moment Tom — and the camera — sets eyes on Summer, something magical happens, and we want them to be together.
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Tom and Summer, both 20-somethings, meet at the greeting-card company where they work, and soon are exchanging kisses beside the copy machine and engaging in other charming office-romance staples. (Come to think of it, I've never seen anyone kiss at the copy machine where I work. Maybe I'm just not paying attention.) He's a cutely sweater-vested fellow who still believes in love; she's a doe-eyed beauty who says, "There's no such thing as love, it's fantasy," so sweetly that Tom falls head over heels, as do we.
And off we go on the Tom-and-Summer roller coaster, through the good dates and the bad dates and the canoodling and the accusations and the meaningful glances and the not-so-meaningful conversation ("I love Ringo Starr." "Nobody loves Ringo Starr." "That's why I love him.") and . . . well, everything that goes into 500 days of a relationship, for good or ill. Through it all, Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel find truth in every scene, particularly one late moment in which he shoots her a look that's a wordless definition of love.
"(500) Days of Summer" is indeed a love story, but an unexpected one, right down to the last word of the screenplay (which I wouldn't dream of spoiling for you). I fell in love with it, myself; you might, too.
(500) Days of Summer
*** 1/2
• Rated: PG-13 for sexual material and language.
• Director: Marc Webb.
• Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend, Chloe Moretz, Matthew Gray Gubler, Clark Gregg.
• Running time: 96 minutes.