smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

First impression: I am going to hate this movie. Reason: the titles! Again! This time it was a ridiculous assemblage of cliches. Well, two cliches: 1) Split-screen ubercute home movies of our main characters, set to 2) one of those this-side-of-twee generic indie songs voiced by a woman who probably looks like a pixie. (It’s not a secret that I prefer my indie to be on the other side of power pop than this.)

I also didn’t care for the (fake?) disclaimer at the beginning that called the (real?) woman we’re meant to think is the woman who broke the screenwriter’s heart a bitch.

Plus there’s a wholly unnecessary narrator. And a number of things I thought were maybe a little too precious. The two best friends were bland stock characters (and they seem to only serve the purpose of showing how well-socialized the main character, Tom, is. Summer, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have any friends, and this is just one more thing Tom and the audience simply don’t know about her. I found that refreshing). And for some reason I was disappointed that the movie takes place in L.A. I wanted it to be set in Chicago. Don’t ask me why, but seriously — it really felt like it should have been an urban Midwestern movie. (Although I suppose it is nice to have a movie set in L.A. that has nothing whatsoever to do with The Industry; in fact, it’s kind of amusing that the main character works as a greeting card copywriter . . . but even then, he’s only doing it because he supposedly failed as an architect so there’s some sort of parallel thing being set up and I’m going to ignore the nagging “how did he nail this job in the first place” question at the back of my head and get out of this parenthetical.)

But somehow the movie manages to stay grounded, and at the risk of sounding cliche myself, I have to say that the story strikes more true moments than any other relationshippy movie I’ve seen, at least in recent years. It’s not a story of how boy met girl, it’s not even a story of how boy loses girl, it’s a story about after boy loses girl, that “what the hell just happened” stage, and in that it reminded me a little bit of Annie Hall. With a more unabashedly romantic male lead who rejects ironic detachment — even, I would say, by the end.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is really wonderful. There’s one tiny moment, somewhere during the post-breakup wallow phase, where he shuffles into a convenience store in his robe (shades of The Dude) to buy liquor and Twinkies (like you do) and the cashier gives him this “SRSLY” look and Gordon-Leavitt shoots an absolutely perfect weary/irritated “DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM” look back and it’s so, so funny. There are more of those moments, bursts of unexpected humor (I’m also thinking of the musical scene set to Hall & Oates, in particular the beginning when he checks his reflection), that counteract the “here’s where we establish our faux-indie cred” moments. And there’s a brilliant split-screen segment near the end; one side labeled “Expectations” and the other labeled “Reality” that . . . well, for me that would have been worth the price of admission had I gone to see this in the theater.

Duff summed it up well — this isn’t the cutesy but maybe a little edgy rom-com you might think it is. I liked the way it upended gender stereotypes in a way that wasn’t played for laughs as it usually is, that “see what we’re doing here? SHE’S the DUDE, and HE’S the CHICK” anvil that by now is fairly overplayed. Summer’s reluctance to be in any sort of serious relationship is on the surface borne out of real psychological issues — deeper than that we don’t see because she refuses to let anyone into her head, including us. I really liked that. And then that Tom believes in true love and soulmates and fate isn’t taken as a mark of his emasculation, but rather it folds in neatly with how he was brought up — listening to sad British pop music. I mean, that TOTALLY makes sense.

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