Shortly after Sundance 2009, Paul wrote a post explaining why he walked out of one of the festival’s biggest buzz-suckers, the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer. “I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left,” he wrote. Acknowledging that he couldn’t “write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch,” he instead decided to “write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it,” using a particularly glowing blurb about the film as a bounceboard. Pouncing on a much friendlier comparison to Garden State, Paul wrote 500 off as a weak copy of Zach Braff’s break-out: “It’s kind of like if Garden State had been turned into a TV series, recast, cancelled, then bought by USA network and restarted.”
I did see (500) Days of Summer all the way through (the parentheses were added to the title after Sundance, presumably in a nod to one of the film’s visual tics), so I can review it, but I can’t say Paul’s instinct based on the first thirty minutes was off the mark. The film begins with an on screen disclaimer, an “author’s note” declaring that what we’re about to see is not based on real people or events (punchline: someone named “Jenny Beckman” is nonetheless a “bitch”); shortly after the picture begins to roll in earnest, a deep-voiced gentleman narrator informs us that “This is not a love story.” The aggressive out-of-the-gate broadcasting of all that (500) Days of Summer is not foreshadows what it actually is: a film full of signs with nothing to signify, a mashup of a decade’s worth of Sundance cliche, a confirmation of the obsolescence of the notion that “independent film” could seek to subvert business as usual.

Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Tom, a wannabe architect who falls in love with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) at the Los Angeles greeting card production company where both work. Summer, the narrator tells us, was “just another girl … except she wasn’t” — as evidenced by her power to get landlords to offer lower rents and high school boys to buy Belle & Sebastian records. Tom falls in love with this minx in bangs and high-waisted pants at first sight, but the swoon is not quite mutual. After they more or less reenact the famous “but do you like me like me” scene from The Wonder Years at the only karaoke bar in the world that has The Pixies on the books but not “Born to Run,” Summer soon assents to “holding hands in IKEA and having shower sex,” but she repeatedly reminds Tom that she’s “not looking for anything serious.” So suckered by what he likes that he can’t see what Summer is like, Tom chooses to ignore this warning. In scenes shuffled between and/or rendered redundant by inconsistently deployed structuring devices (the aforementioned narration, intertitles assigning action to specific points on a 500 day timeline), the narrative hopskotches between Tom and Summer’s courtship, their break-up, and Tom’s varying attempts to either get over it or get Summer back.

These structural agitations might have had more power if employed by filmmakers with original insight into age-old romantic disconnects, but unfortunately, there’s little going on under the surface here beyond a gender flip of the thesis of He’s Just Not That Into You. That studio comedy, as I wrote when it was released, is “tougher, bleaker, and much more talky than you’d expect it to be,” but it also “understands who its audience is, and that ultimately, that audience doesn’t come to the movies to get their expectations subverted.” The first film to market is ultimately the more interesting one, and it’s less manipulative, too. Where He’s Just Not That Into You teases nuance before conforming to genre expectations, 500 uses its high concept design and totems of a romanticized long-lost counterculture (Joy Division t-shirts, conversations about The Smiths) as cover for a rendering of the rules of the romantic game that’s as deeply shallow and and ready-to-eat safe as any studio product. Of course, awareness of its artifice is built in. Late in the film, too lovelorn to write greeting cards, Tom breaks down at work and rants about how “it’s these cards, and the movies and the pop songs, that are responsible for all the lies!” Well, only some of them.

Co-produced by Diablo Cody’s agent Mason Novick and lensed by the cinematographer of Juno, there’s no question that Summer, though Marc Webb’s directorial debut, comes from a by-now-familiar cinematic line. Like Napoleon Dynamite and Waitress, Little Miss Sunshine and Garden State, before it, 500 Days of Summer was distrubuted by studio dependent Fox Searchlight after a Sundance premiere; like those films, it melds dysfunctional romantic and/or familial relationship drama with cutesy visual quirk and a catchy (though totally milquetoast) hipster soundtrack. Not every Fox Searchlight release hews to this template, but those that don’t tend to end up playing second banana as cultural phenoms to those that do (see the distributor’s two 2008 Oscar horses, Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler).

You can’t blame Searchlight for buying these films — all of the Sundance pick-ups named above earned enough in their initial box office runs to rank amongst the distributor’s Top 25 grossers to date, far out-performing award winners and critical favorites such as Boys Don’t Cry, The Ice Storm and Waking Life. The numbers speak for themselves: where their corporate parent and other “real” studios use explosions and comic book heros to foot the bill for the rest of the year’s production/distribution slate, Searchlight has sad sack underdog heroes and loveably eccentric kewpie-cute girls. (500) Days of Summer has both. Think of it as the Searchlight house style perfected and taken to the brink of self-parody (judging by the trailer alone, the upcoming Aspergers love story Adam would seem to push fully into Weird Al territory, but we’ll see). Its biggest selling point is its formula, but its most lasting effect is the extent to which it reveals the formula’s limitations.