Retrospective Review: (100) Minutes of Dishonesty

Retrospective Review: (100) Minutes of Dishonesty

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I can get around the basic complaints that my good-taste friends have of Summer. I can get around, for instance, its annoying too-hip-ness, with its Regina-Spektor-Wolfmother-Smiths-She-and-Him soundtrack, its casting of Zooey Deschanel as the titular Summer, and its parentheses around the number “500” in the title (why?). I’m not a very aesthetic filmgoer anyway, and as long as the story interests me, I can overlook whatever costume it’s been dressed up in. I can even get around my friend Emily’s (apt) complaint that the film is “a music video about a girl who’s not passionate about anything but being crushable.” True, sure, but it acknowledges her flaws, I think, with its opening graphic: “The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch”. Clearly, the film dislikes the character just as much as most of us do.

No, the real reason I can’t get behind a film that I’m supposed to like (it was recommended to me steadily, for a year, by everyone who knew my affinity for romantic comedies) is the Glee thing: it makes its argument on my turf, and because of that, when it gets things wrong, I don’t just find it to be a cinematic failure, I find it to be a failure much more profound and much more serious. I find it dishonest at best and reprehensible at worst. What makes (500) Days of Summer so wrong is that it manages to get a handful of things right.

Before I get to my ultimate point, let me prove this one: (500) Days of Summer pretty unabashedly wants to be Annie Hall (1977) for the twenty-first century. It’d be hard for anyone to argue this, considering the myriad ways it’s true.

It’s true aesthetically. There’s a free-form emphasis on creating scenes that reflect how the characters feel, regardless of whether they make sense or not. In 1977, Alvy Singer broke the fourth wall, re-imagined his childhood home as having been located under a roller coaster on Coney Island, inserted cartoon clips of Annie-as-Wicked Queen from Snow White, and pulled Marshall McLuhan out of thin air to end a debate on media literacy. In 2009, Tom Hansen performs a choreographed musical number with the whole city on the morning he first sleeps with Summer, stars in a French New Wave film in which cupid beats him at chess, sees thirty five Summers sitting on a bus, and splits the screen between “Reality” and “Expectations”—the latter almost a direct lift from Allen’s subtitled conversation on Annie’s terrace, letting us know what’s “meant” and what’s “said.”

It’s true narratively. Not only are both films non-linear, the structure of Summer borders on the plagiaristic. Scene one consists of our hero, post-relationship, battered and wondering How It All Went Wrong, doing his best to piece it all together. Scene two shows the central couple on one last horrible date at the very end of their relationship. Scene three goes back to when and how they met, from Meet Cute to flirtation to first conversation, etc. onward until the final scene, which ends in both films with the couple reconnecting after having lost touch and realizing it’s probably for the best.

And it’s true content-wise, at least insofar as both films set to cast a net over the entire emotional spectrum, rather than concentrate on the problems and issues of their specific central couples. It would be fair to say that the majority of romantic comedies, from Girl Shy (1927) to The Apartment (1960) to My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), work by setting obstacles over which their respective couples need to triumph—it’s situational humor. The hero and heroine don’t “represent” a larger contingency, they only stand for themselves. The films don’t make any commentary on relationships as a whole, just on the situation at hand. Nobody watches Some Like it Hot (1958) and gets a greater understanding of, or a profound truth about, the nature of love.

Summer and Hall, though, ask us to view the characters as stand-ins for ourselves. I think what I mean by that is neither film is situational: “Its protagonist, like Norman Bates or Luke Skywalker, arrives not as Plausible Person but as Cinematic Archetype; in this case, the archetype being Romantic Loser Par Excellence.” In both films, when the characters fight or bump heads or break up or whatever, it’s simply because, they seem to be saying, that’s what relationships are: minefields, dangerous by their very nature, an unnatural-seeming fuse of two different personalities that will never fully understand each other. Hall, in fact, ends with almost that exact coda: “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ The guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships: they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, but I guess we keep going through it because, most of us need the eggs.”

Okay, you’re thinking, so (500) Days of Summer wants to be just like Annie Hall. Great. Who cares? Well, for one thing, recall what a lofty goal “being just like Annie Hall” is. Recall that the film beat out Star Wars (!) for Best Picture in 1977, that it in fact nearly swept the whole ceremony, winning also Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Recall that Hall, even outside of its cinematic success, became a cultural phenomenon, changing fashion even, hordes of women everywhere in big hats and ties. Recall that Hall so changed Woody Allen’s career that it’s used as a marker of time, as in his “pre- and post-Annie Hall  films.” In short, keep in mind that essentially to accept that Summer aims to be like Hall is to accept that Summer can’t just be dismissed as a fluffy romantic comedy with no real weight. It wants you to take it seriously. And that’s where the problems begin.

Just yesterday I was grading papers at a coffee shop and one of the young (male) students at the table next to me said to his friends, “Have you guys seen (500) Days of Summer? That’s, like, the story of my life.” And the film wants a reaction just like that. It wants to be a mirror. And most strikingly, it achieved that want, on the whole. Read reviews of it: they’re bizarre. All these critics taking the movie so weirdly personally. Roger Ebert sounds indignant: “What kind of woman likes you perfectly sincerely and has no one else in her life but is not interested in ever getting married? Have you known someone like that? In romance, we believe what we want to believe. That’s the reason 500 Days of Summer is so appealing.” Gregory Weinkauf of the Huffington Post begins his entire review by outlining how much his own romantic life has “sucked” in the past twenty years. Bruce Demara of the Toronto Star says, “Falling in or falling out? The film offers a helpful tonic for either condition.” People, in other words, look past the film as mere entertainment, as disposable trash, as Sweet Home Alabama (2002) or whatever, and absorb it with a reverence so scary it demands examination.

And to be sure, as I’ve said, there’s a lot to revere here. Or at least take seriously. For one, Summer is a female lead who resists commitment while her male counterpart struggles to not fall in love with her, and that’s kind of sweet considering how it gets treated by the filmmakers as a valid and adult decision (in the past year alone, No Strings Attached, Love and Other Drugs, and Friends with Benefits have all handled women who buck commitment as a hilarious and kind-of smutty concept). And when Tom runs into issues with her outlook on dating, they’re concrete issues, understandable ones we can empathize with, and worded reasonably: “I understand not putting labels on things,” he says to her at the threshold of his door when she comes over to apologize, “but I need some sense of stability, so that I know you’re not gonna just wake up tomorrow and feel differently.” And you see the logic in that, so it’s kind of shocking how sensible her retort is, her hand on his cheek as she whispers: “But I can’t give you that,” and then, adding, “no one can.”

This is what I mean about the film’s attempt to make commentary on relationships as a whole. It’s the film’s sensibility and its wholly dire point of view that love is simply fickle, that it’s based on an irrational set of emotions and that, no matter how much you build or how sure you feel, tomorrow you could wake up and it’ll be gone. It’s the idea that it isn’t just Summer-the-character, but no one who can offer that kind of stability. And further, the film even makes a valiant attempt to locate the root of this conflict of interest, blaming Tom’s inability to accept Summer’s good common sense on an entire culture that’s created it. They meet over a mutual fondness for the Smiths; she breaks up with him by comparing their relationship with Sid and Nancy; his outlook is based on “a complete misreading of the ending of The Graduate” (and it’s significant that, when they watch this film together, she does get it). “You didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend, and now you’re someone’s wife,” Tom says to a married Summer at the end. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand that.” And, again, it’s his inability to “understand” vs. her simple explanation that “I wasn’t sure, and then one day I woke up, and I was,” that underlines the film’s point: that there’s nothing to understand—it’s impossible. That’s the film’s thesis, which of course is why it’s so embraced by a population of people who fall and get hurt every day.

But here’s the problem: is that why it’s so embraced? Do audiences recognize the difference between this and your standard rom-com? Do the filmmakers, even? If so, then why are so many of the usual, irritating rom-com trappings present? Why, for instance, is there a Precocious Little Kid who offers mature advice from the sidelines? Why is there a narrator guiding us through the story, holding the audience at a comfortable distance? Why does Tom have a pair of sitcom best friends who say things like, “Maybe she’s an uppity, better-than-everyone super skank”? All of this stuff makes the film seem dismissive of its own central theme—the way relationships are doomed to go south and the perverse romantic impulse that keeps people trying anyway. It’s almost as if the filmmakers are saying, Hey, don’t worry, we don’t think this stuff is all that important. As if you can’t make a film about two people struggling as a couple without the stupid, lowest-common denominator elements.

But the real offense comes with the film’s final scene. Finally recognizing he’s been beaten, Tom quits his job and goes to an interview, starting his life over. And, waiting at said job interview, he meets a girl (about whom we learn nothing, except that she’s a girl), and the wholly needless narrator says, “If Tom had learned anything… it was that you can’t ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. Tom had finally learned, there’s no such thing as fate, nothing is meant to be. He knew, he was sure of it now…he was almost sure.” And then Tom turns around, asks her out, and smiles at the camera when she accepts. To add insult to injury, the counter that has been keeping track of the five-hundred days flips to “1”, as if to suggest this will all start over again.

You have to be a little wary of a film that doesn’t allow its protagonist to learn—indeed, makes a point of stating that he hasn’t learned. Does the film believe anything it’s said in the previous one hundred minutes, or does it simply think that yeah, relationships are hard but here’s one more maybe that’ll work. “It’s these cards, and the movies and the pop songs, they’re to blame for all the lies and the heartache, everything,” Tom says when he finally quits his greeting card company toward the end. “I think we do a bad thing here.” Which is a pretty heavy charge to make from a film that does exactly that. Rob Gordon in High Fidelity (2000) faced a similar dilemma—deriving his entire romantic outlook from his music collection—but learned that this is futile and accepted his real-life relationship for its lack of drama. Even Alvy Singer decided that the real point of relationships is not happiness in another person but simply that they feed us in malleable ways (“we need the eggs”). Tom, however, never decides that life is not a dramatic narrative, and instead jumps to the next woman, and we’re supposed to accept that as a happy ending.

 

6/10

1 Comment

  1. Om diensten aan leden, accomplices en of bezoekers beschikbaar te kunnen stellen en hun belangen goed te kunnen behartigen, is het noodzakelijk dat wij in een aantal gevallen uw bedrijfs-en/of persoonsgegevens verwerken. Wij respecteren uw security en zorgen dat al uw persoonsgegevens vertrouwelijk worden behandeld. kijken volledige film snederlense

    Reply

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