There's a particular kind of film that earns its keep not on first viewing but on the twentieth, when you've stopped watching the plot and started watching your own reactions to it. (500) Days of Summer, Marc Webb's 2009 non-linear romcom starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, is that film for a lot of people. For the writer here, it's something more specific: an annual ritual, a relationship Rorschach test, a shared language with his wife that started on the first date they ever went on together. The film's premise is structurally simple and emotionally complex. Tom is a diehard romantic who falls instantly for Summer when she praises his Smiths taste in a lift. Summer resists labelling what they have. The 500 days that follow — told non-linearly, skipping between early joy and late wreckage — ask a question the film never fully answers: were they a couple, or weren't they? That refusal to adjudicate is the whole mechanism. The film is about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of relationships, and how two people in the same relationship can be telling completely different stories. What holds up in 2024 is how little the film condescends. It is more sympathetic to Tom than to Summer, but it is not stupid about why. Tom's romanticism is shown as both beautiful and controlling — his vision of what Summer should mean to him shapes what he sees, and the film's most famous sequence, the split-screen Expectations vs Reality moment, is cinema's most economical diagram of how hope deforms perception. Summer, meanwhile, is not a villain or a manic pixie dream girl in the pejorative sense, despite Deschanel's Ur-MPDG casting — she tells Tom plainly, repeatedly, what she can and cannot offer. He just doesn't believe her. The production holds up too, and this is rarer than it sounds. The sepia-tinged Los Angeles of downtown plazas and art deco high-rises has aged better than any beach or Hills glamour shot would have. The soundtrack — She & Him, Regina Spektor, The Smiths — is a time capsule that somehow doesn't feel like one. The costuming is squarely 2009 (cardigans, ties, those Puma trainers) without becoming a period-piece distraction. And Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel have the kind of chemistry that reads as plausible rather than performed, which is what the film needs to make the breakup land. The annual rewatch structure the writer describes — trying on different sympathies each year, arguing over who was worse, theorising about the precise moment everything went wrong — is a genuinely intelligent way to use a film. He and his wife have been together since that first date in September 2009, and the ritual they've built around this particular film is less about the film than about using it as a mirror. Tom was wrong about Summer being his true love. The writer is certain he wasn't wrong. That's the whole argument, settled in one paragraph.
