Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber originally intended (500) Days of Summer, which opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theatre, to be set in San Francisco. But after taking a walking tour of Los Angeles one day with director Marc Webb, they decided to shift its setting. With its decaying art deco buildings, grungy dive bars and gritty daytime market, downtown L.A. has a retro look which suits the movie perfectly.
“There’s not a whole lot of cues off the bat to let you know the
movie’s set in L.A.,” says Webb during a roundtable discussion in Santa
Monica. “L.A. is easy to pastiche. You think of Venice, Beverly Hills
and Hollywood. But the fact that there is an L.A. that was here before
that is mind-boggling. The people who built downtown in the last
century had a lot of hope for it. They thought there was going to be
this majestic future for downtown Los Angeles. That’s clearly not the
way it turned out.”
The old-school setting is fitting since the film’s central
character, an office worker named Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is always
looking for meaning in the past and is obsessed with architecture. He
often sits on a park bench on a bluff to stare nostalgically at the
buildings and admire the workmanship that went into them.
He finds who he thinks is his soul mate in new employee Summer
(Zooey Deschanel), a dazzling woman who wears vintage dresses and
shares his love for the world-weary music of the Smiths. They become
friends and even start dating, though Summer makes it clear she doesn’t
consider him her boyfriend. At first, Tom is OK with that, but the more
he gets to know Summer, the more he likes her. And it’s not long before
he’s fending off other male suitors and acting possessive, creating an
awkward tension between them that makes their relationship fall
apart.
“We’re taught that love conquers all,” says Webb. “We’re told that
if you wax your back and learn to dance, you’ll date a supermodel.
That’s such a fucking lie. I grew up with those assumptions, and having
to deal with that in a realistic way is an important process, and it’s
often ignored for the sake of wish fulfillment. We wanted to set up a
romantic comedy at the beginning and then slowly arrive at a different
conclusion.”
The movie is told out of sequence, so we see the break-up early on,
as the film covers a 500-day period in a dizzying manner, randomly
flashing forward and backward. One minute, Tom’s elated, literally
dancing in the streets to Hall & Oates’ punchy “You Make My
Dreams.” The next, he’s drinking himself into oblivion, holed up in his
apartment for days.
“When I was writing the script, the only thing that’s going to keep
this from being a long diary entry about my woe was when I came up with
the structure,” says Neustadter, who based the movie on a personal
experience. “After I wrote it, it stayed in a drawer for a long time. I
didn’t think people would laugh at the same things. Once we showed it
to people, we found they related to it in a way that surprised us.”
The movie is careful not to demonize Summer. It’s as much Tom’s
fault as it is hers that things don’t work out. And Deschanel portrays
Summer as an adorable young woman, so even if you wanted to, you’d have
a hard time blaming her for Tom’s malaise.
“One of the things that’s interesting about our generation is that
everyone is liberated but confused about a lot of different things,”
says Deschanel. “There’s a polarization of different points of view.
People are either cynical or overly romantic about love. They’ll swing
the pendulum. Somebody’s in love one day and totally out of love the
next day. We have more freedom. We don’t have to get married and we
don’t have to do a lot of things. But what role does love have for our
generation? These characters represent that point of view.”
Gordon-Levitt agrees, dismissing the notion that the movie is a
“bromance” or that his character isn’t manly enough to handle Summer’s
dismissal.
“They’re individuals who don’t fit into any boxes,” he says. “My
friends who are guys feel like the movie’s honest. Whether we want to
admit it or not, we’ve all been that guy at some point.”
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2009.
