A rom-com for the playlist generation

Since the success of Sundance Festival hits like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno, everybody’s looking for the next Easy-Bake indie hit: the usual ingredients include sassy or ironic dialogue, sassy or ironic characters, copious references to ‘80s music and TV, J.D. Salinger allusions, and a few heaping tablespoons of quirk.

500 Days of Summer feels like an indie movie, at least on paper, but it tries too hard to follow the above template, with Pixies and Smiths tunes on the soundtrack (extra points if you use the Velvet Underground), allusions to Knight Rider, Ikea, karaoke, Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” plus nods to much better films from the past, including Mike Nichol’s 1967 classic The Graduate.

Indeed, we should all continue to pay royalties — including Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzmann, the makers of 500 Days of Summer and many others — to The Graduate’s sense of countercultural nebbishness, as it dovetails so nicely with our generation’s sense of “huh?” and continues to invade and infiltrate leagues of filmmakers.

But 500 Days of Summer has a few other things going for it besides references to Catcher in the Rye and cool playlists. It has a couple hip young actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel — hey, even her name is a Salinger reference!) going against their darker indie inclinations to serve up a — gulp! — rom-com for the iPod playlist generation.

Well, not really. That would be last year’s indie confection, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. Instead, 500 Days of Summer gives us Tom (Gordon-Levitt), a would-be architect who writes greeting cards, and Summer (Deschanel), the secretary of Tom’s boss. Both are into retro-hip clothing: Tom dresses like Mr. Rogers, in tie and sweater vests, with headphones, naturally, wrapped around his neck most of the time; Summer, with her ‘60s “It” girl bangs and ‘50s skirts, looks like a groovy June Cleaver or a hipster waitress. But their charm nearly lifts the kooky indulgences of the Scott Neustadter/Michael Weber script beyond mere rom-com targets.

Summer is loose and breezy, and Tom is immediately smitten, but he finds out during the company’s “karaoke night” that she doesn’t want a boyfriend; indeed, she doesn’t believe in love, declaring it “a fantasy.” Tom’s drunken friend announces: “Oh, my God... you’re a dude!”

That leaves Tom in the “Nancy” role for the duration of this “Sid and Nancy” relationship (movie set photos indicate there probably was an homage to that ‘80s doomed romance planned in the original script).

With her wide eyes and retro look, Deschanel has become an indie queen, and she’s certainly great at projecting deadpan reaction and spaciness (though let’s face it: she’s no Parker Posey). Despite her claims about love, she snogs Tom in the copier room (where else?) and proceeds to engage in a non-relationship with Tom that includes movies, sex, pancake breakfasts and shopping for Ringo Starr albums.

Tom is perplexed, but the architectural graduate who writes banal greeting cards goes along for the ride. The script is “non-linear” (a favorite indie cinema term), starting with the aftermath of their breakup and working its way back and forth along the relationship timeline. Yes, Annie Hall and others have done this before (Woody Allen’s film also gifted us with the “testimonial” approach to the rom-com, in which characters are interviewed on-camera, a tactic stolen by Rob Reiner for When Harry Met Sally — though Allen probably stole it from some European director). Still, most of director Marc Webb’s quirky flourishes pay off, such as the split-screen “Expectations/Reality” segment and the Big Dance Musical scene set to Hall and Oates’ You Make My Dreams Come True. (If the scene doesn’t immediately make you gag, it will kind of remind you of those old Dr. Pepper TV ads.)

What doesn’t work as well is the existence of a younger sister who gives relationship advice to Tom on a soccer field — shades of Phoebe Caulfield, but with a potty mouth. Also high on the “big no-no” list is the voiceover narration, which works for Magnolia or The Opposite of Sex, but is completely unnecessary here. The voiceover’s main function is to tell us, “straight out of the gate, this is not a love story.”

Towards the end of the movie, we find out if Mr. Voiceover is indeed telling the truth, and if 500 Days of Summer has the balls to avoid the reconciliation path taken by nine out of 10 Hollywood rom-coms.

It’s always a bad move, though, when a director alludes to a classic movie — such as The Graduate — and it immediately makes you want to watch that movie instead. Sure enough, in one scene Tom and Summer are in a movie theater, watching the final part of The Graduate, where, after having escaped the wedding ceremony, the wide-eyed Katherine Ross sits in the back of a public bus with the wild-eyed Dustin Hoffman, and they launch into silence and an uncertain future that belies the comfortable, conventional romantic ending; watching it again, I kept thinking, Wow, movies really had something to say back then.

Gordon-Levitt here might seem a little out of his field, playing a nebbishy romantic hero (hello, Dustin!). The former 3rd Rock from the Sun TV star has gained serious cred in edgier fare such as Mysterious Skin and Brick. But he manages to pull it off, going for, as my wife explained it, what “edgy” actor Ryan Gosling was apparently doing in The Notebook (i.e., big box office appeal).

What puzzled us throughout 500 Days of Summer, especially since Tom was such an open book, was: What is Summer’s deal, exactly? She’s strangely enigmatic, yet the “she’s a dude” explanation doesn’t really explain her motivation. She apparently is capable of blithely using Tom as a F.B. until “Mr. Right” comes along, but such a conclusion would surely lead to 1,000 Days of Bitterness, not the uplifting ending the romantic comedy genre requires.

Some clues to her true nature come from the director, who notes in his press kit: “We all know Summer because Summer isn’t just a girl, she’s an event.” When the director broke up with his “Summer,” he explains, “I couldn’t shake that feeling that something had gone horribly, painfully wrong with the universe.” This, the film nails pretty well. We never get the sense that Tom’s pain will lead to the end of the world or anything nearly as drastic, and there are certainly no Sid and Nancy moments. But when you peel back all the quirky directorial touches and stylistic excesses, perhaps the lesson of heartbreak — however brief — is the true gift of 500 Days of Summer.