This may seem like an unusual choice to list among cynical romance movies. It tends to be listed among the most romantic movies of the past few years. And this is appropriate, but maybe not in the way most people seem to think. For those of us who think romance is heavily steeped in BS (not always in a bad way), 500 Days of Summer is so, so brilliant for its ability to expose the amount of delusion that goes along with romantic interest in another person. It’s done with more subtlety than people realize or give it credit here, though. The clearest moment is the famous split-screen scene depicting “Expectations” and “Reality,” and how little they aligned for the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character.
It’s from there that we begin to realize the highly subjective perspective we’ve been watching from is Tom’s (if the dance number didn’t give it away), and the big reveal that’s done almost indistinguishably at the end is that he has basically sugar-coated their entire relationship, seen it through the prism of his own rose-colored viewpoint and at the movie’s end we see those glasses come off.
Summer was always sort of cold and indifferent towards him. The romance was never what he thought it was. And so while we’ve witnessed so many sweet little moments between the two of them, it’s unclear how many of them actually happened, or were as sweet as Tom thought. The lesson that romance is largely delusional is pretty cynical, but at least when Tom meets Autumn the movie ends on a slightly hopeful note. Or maybe it’s that he’s still hopelessly deluded.
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