Once in a while a film so wonderful comes along that you want to race up the highest building you can find and bellow its greatness from the rooftops, to wake all your friends in the middle of the night just to tell them how wonderful it is. (500) Days of Summer is that film.

“This is a story of boy meets girl,” says the sardonic, omniscient narrator in the film’s opening sequence. “But you should know up front, this is not a love story.” While (500) Days of Summer is romantic and certainly very funny, it could more accurately be titled a romantic tragedy, a bittersweet tale of love found and love lost. There are plenty of films charting the ebb and flow of relationships until the moment at which love conquers all. But what about the other, perhaps even larger group of lovers, who begin with the best of intentions yet still end up with going their separate ways? (500) Days is their story.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) believes in true love, the sort of cosmic romance found only in fairy tales that draws two unique souls across time and space to one another. This makes him the perfect copywriter for a greeting card company, even though he feels his true calling is architecture. His co-worker and girl-next-door extraordinaire Summer (Zooey Deschanel) also believes in destiny — that all relationships are destined to end in shattered hearts and broken dreams. Tom not only believes in “the one,” he believes that one is Summer, and his idealistic optimism sidesteps Summer’s cynicism, seeing it as nothing more than just another metaphorical dragon to be slain by fate. He promptly falls in love, both with the beautiful, droll, clever woman Summer is and the ideal she represents, despite the fact that she warns him on the outset that she is not looking for anything serious. In Tom’s defense, don’t we all say that?

We do not witness Tom and Summer’s history in chronological order, but rather hopscotch through time, shuffling through memories both good and bad, title cards informing us as to what point in the year and a half span of their relationship we are seeing. Sequentially ordered days would naturally leads us from loves first blushes — playing house at Ikea, taking in French New Wave films, lazy weekends in the park, whispering secrets to each other in bed — to the initial ruptures and inevitable implosion — a fight in a restaurant, drunken karaoke confessions — but the prismatic chronology jumbles these all together, much as they would be in our own minds should we have experienced the emotional highs and lows ourselves.

This shattered chronology works brilliantly because the thread holding each scene together is the tremendous emotional honesty of the brilliant and stylish script, self-diagnostic in the manner of Woody Allen. Simultaneously starry-eyed and profoundly pragmatic (the way love really is), the sharply observed screenplay, distinctive because it is written from a guy’s perspective, is truthful, riddled with universal questions and brave enough to follow through with an initial promise that we may not get the ending we want. That screenwriters Scott Neustadt and Michael Weber also penned Pink Panther 2, easily one of the worst films of 2009, is beyond inexplicable.

First time feature director Marc Webb has made an offbeat, absurdly creative and wholly original first film, the work of a seasoned and ridiculously confident veteran. He shoots L.A. as if it was New York and pairs the marvelous script with one of the best soundtracks in years. (500) Days of Summer is a sort of American Amélie in which fantasy elements constantly spill into the literal world through whimsical cracks in the narrative. The film’s miraculously inventive visual style is linked to Tom’s rose-colored subjectivity and conveyed through flights of cinematic fancy including dream sequences, direct camera address, split screens representing expectations versus reality, musical dance numbers and a pre-title crawl. There were several times I found myself yelping aloud in pleasure.

Casting non-stars makes (500) Days all the more accessible. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who got his start on the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun but cut his cinematic teeth on serious and under-seen films like Brick, is tremendous as the love-addled Tom. He is exuberant without being cloying, vulnerable without moping. Zooey Deschanel, who has played this role several times before, a history which makes the role that much more ideal, is an intoxicating pixie sprite. But neither is so unique that we cannot identify with them.

There are not enough words to describe how much I adored this magical, transcendent film. Despite the sometimes cold realities that the film confronts, (500) Days of Summer is probably the best romantic comedy since When Harry Met Sally. You are wrong sardonic, omniscient narrator. This is a love story. I am in love with this film.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.