Inventive, brutally honest romantic comedy ranks among year's best

"(500) Days of Summer" traces a greeting card writer's romance that lasts exactly 500 days from the moment that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) lays eyes on the beguiling Summer (Zooey Deschanel) at his office.

OK, I wasn't expecting much from this movie. It's directed by Marc Webb, a noted music video maker, and noted music video makers tend to make erratic features that look snazzy, but can't carry a plot or support the characters beyond a pithy opening comment or two.

So, I was surprised when "(500) Days of Summer" turned out to be one of the freshest, most inventively rendered romantic comedies I have seen at least in the last 10 years.

It's filled with crackling wit, excellent performances, and two complex, contradictory main characters who act like they've been snatched from real life, instead of being dragged from a screenwriter's stock character warehouse.

But the most amazing part of this movie is how Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber turn the narrative into a grand adventure all by itself.

See, "(500) Days of Summer" doesn't limit itself to one style of storytelling. It wants to try a whole bunch of them.

It uses a voice-over narrator to tell us key parts of the story. Normally, I hate narration, because it's a lazy device usually employed by lazy writers to help lazy actors tell a story without working up much of a sweat.

Here, it works!

The movie also shifts Tom and Summer's 500 days out of sequence. The story starts by showing us what happens on Day 488, then what happens earlier days, then later, then in-between. Our brains are fully engaged in piecing these cinematic puzzle pieces together to understand the sequence of events that becomes their story.

On a day when Tom feels so happy he wants to sing, he does, and breaks into a fantasy segment where everyone he meets in a Los Angeles park joins him in a full-blown musical tribute to his own giddy feelings. (Here, Webb falls back on his music video background for sheer fun.)

Then comes the coolest thing about "(500) Days of Summer." The screen splits into two simultaneous alternate universes.

One is called "Expectations." The other is "Reality."

On the left screen, we see the evening's events play out as Tom expects them to in his mind. On the right screen, we see what really happens.

This kind of dicey device could easily fall prey to exaggeration and cheap comic effect. But it's close to perfect, because the differences between what Tom expects and what he gets during a night with Summer are subtle, telling and heartbreaking.

Lots of credit for this goes to Gordon-Levitt, who plays Tom as a shy, tortured romantic soul who passionately believes in true, one-of-a-kind, forever love. He wanted to be an architect, but wound up creating lame emotional expressions to fill the pages of greeting cards.

Deschanel, after playing funny best friends and supporting roles, earns her leading lady role here. Her chemistry with Gordon-Levitt is wonderfully combustible as she plays Summer as an alluring, practical woman who doesn't buy into the romantic fantasies that fill Tom's emotional voids. She's not at all sure about real love.

"(500) Days" chronicles the torment and joys of Tom's romance, mostly the torment, as it becomes clear that Summer, after a few hot dates, is turning increasingly cool to the poor writer, prompting him to get into trouble at work by composing inappropriate phrases for greeting cards.

One of the few disappointments in "(500) Days" is Tom's little sister Rachel (Chloe Moretz), whose inexplicable wisdom on the subjects of romance and dating feels more at home in a TV sitcom than in this sharply observed, brutally honest comedy.

This becomes a minor flub in a realistic romantic comedy that will sit nicely at the top of my top 10 list for 2009.

<p class="factboxheadblack">'(500) Days of Summer'</p> <p class="News">Four stars</p> <p class="News"><b>Starring:</b> Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel</p> <p class="News"><b>Directed by:</b> Marc Webb</p> <p class="News"><b>Other:</b> A Fox Searchlight release. At the River East 21 and Century Centre in Chicago, and the Evanston CineArts 6. (Expands to Northwest suburbs on July 24.) Rated PG-13 for language, sexual situations. 95 minutes</p>