(500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer
Directed by Marc Webb
Runtime: 95 min.

In a Lonely Place
Directed by Nicholas Ray
At Film Forum July 17-23
Runtime: 93 min.

TWEEN-NESS
NEVER STOPS in (500) Days of Summer, the new Juno.It is so annoyingly
cute about the smartness of middle-class young white people in love
that one quickly realizes it is only about that—not love nor passion as
everyone experiences it. Neither is it about male-female romance in a
universal sense—which is to say, the pop sense. By pointing out lead
character Tom’s formative-years obsession with British pop music (The
Smiths, Belle and Sebastian, Jesus and Mary Chain, PiL) the filmmakers
set-up his eventual heartbreak over a girl named Summer, but that
information is really just a class marker. This movie’s smug entirety is
aimed at a mumblecore “us.”

When the media elite praises mumblecore, it
should be understood as minority group egomania. (500) Days
of Summer brings that elitism to the mainstream. Full of hipster
self-congratulation, it imitates the cloying sensitivity of bad Brit
Pop and not its best, tough-minded music.Tom couldn’t have listened to
The Smiths very closely to turn out such a clueless, sentimental
narcissist. His desire for a love-girl and a worthy career (a
professional greeting-card writer, he longs to be an architect) is also
twee. Basing Tom’s emotions on Belle and Sebastian’s The Boy With the
Arab Strap (not even the band’s best album) recalls the presumptuous
Away We Go, which used its super-cute bourgie characters as the
exemplars of modern life.

Truth is, this conceited update of the
Hollywood love story began with 1977’s Annie Hall where Woody Allen
sentimentalized his own heartbreak—a clever, early expression of his
snide misogyny.Tom’s self-absorption conceals his real lack of
self-examination. (Woody Allen got by with often-humorous
distractions.) There’s no parity in such malecentered sob-stories; it’s
always from the selfrighteous guy’s point of view, which looks
particularly bad next to this week’s revival of In a Lonely Place at
Film Forum.

Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film deserves to be better
known; it’s one of Hollywood’s finest examinations of masculinity. In a
Lonely Place (quoted in an early New Order song) perfectly describes
the hell of stoic, adult masculinity embodied by Humphrey Bogart. He plays L.A. screenwriter Dixon Steele (that’s his bluff) whose
professional hazards unleash his private insecurities. Director Ray
immediately defines the terror and unease of sustaining the male
ego.The script’s murder plot provides a noir pretext that goes to the
psychosis of L.A. life (certainly influencing the plot for Altman’s The Player). Ray’s
psychological portrait stems from a fevered, almost expressionistically
dour style.The meanings literally glow (through Burnett Guffey’s
cinematography) as Steele reveals the male animal’s self-destructive
compulsions.

Ray’s melodramatic style draws us into Steele’s
anxiety. Its revelations dazzle the eye and get under your skin.
Bogart’s stardom idealizes the virility and resoluteness we must then
distrust. Steele continues Bogart’s great masculinist exposés that
started with Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. American movies
don’t frequently examine machismo so much as exploit it—which is what
most contemporary movies do with male adolescence—and (500) Days of Summer proves the latest folly.

Everything about (500) Days of Summer is
fraudulent: from the digital-counter titles to the Expectation/Reality
split-screen montage depicting the break-up; from the joyless Hall and
Oates musical production number to Tom’s precocious kid-sister’s
love-counseling (she describes his rival as “some guy she met at the
gym with Brad Pitt’s face and Jesus’ abs”).This confirms “Jaded”
Gordon- Levitt’s uncanny taste for phony (he usually does phony gay
films). Gordon-Levitt’s demeanor as Tom seems sourer than worldweary
Bogart’s. As Summer, Zooey Deschanel’s best scene, explaining surprise
at her own desire, is ruined by director Marc Webb misreading the signs
and tone of a misfit relationship. And then Tom and Summer’s
good-bye—nicely performed—is spoiled by an ending that really is the
most obnoxious movie moment since Juno.