(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.