Quotes of the Day

Dear (500) Days of Summer,

This is a not-quite-love letter to you, you cunning little romantic comedy. In fact, you don't need a billet-doux from me. So many other reviewers — like Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, who gave you an A for Adorable — have sung your praises, as if you were some old pop song they can't get out of their heads. I first saw you more than a week ago, and you've been on my mind ever since. But let's not call it love.

No question, you've got a lot going for you: snazz, schmaltz, an iPod's worth of pop melodies spanning five decades and two of Hollywood's most attractive young stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, to play your leads Tom and Summer. You certainly found the right sugar daddy: the boutique distributor Fox Searchlight has made big hits of Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and Slumdog Millionaire, and you're as winsome as any of those. I also admire your timing: while the rest of the movie world is lining up for Harry Potter and His Teenage Hormones, you cozy up to the discerning sentimentalists who for months have been pining for a movie that'll make them get all smiley and warm.

Your screenwriters, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, and your direct-from-videos director Marc Webb start with this very nice guy, Tom — trained as an architect but for now writing doggerel for greeting cards. When Tom catches sight of Summer, who's just joined the staff, his head rubbernecks and his heart gets whiplash. He's been waiting for love like a winning lottery ticket, and now he thinks he can claim it.

Not so fast, Buster. Summer is friendly but somehow remote; even while going out for karaoke nights with Tom and his louche pals, she maintains a protective force field that keeps him from closing in and really touching her. Which of course makes her all the more desirable. Can't have — must have. Over 500 days, the two spend time together, explore mutual quirks, and after a while become sexual partners; but Summer doesn't want to think of them as "a couple." In time, their conversation comes to resemble the dialectic of middle-aged spouses. (She: "You're happy?" He: "You're not?" She: "We argue all the time." He: "We do not!") Obeying the law of nature, the affair blossoms, then wilts.

In your color scheme and sensibility you're as pretty as a real greeting card — something classy and flossy, the Jacquie Lawson type — but you want us to know you're smart too. So you reorder the elements of the story, hopscotching from day (1) to day (500) and back to day (83), as if you were an iPod set to Shuffle. That makes the whole thing a jumbled series of memories. You announce straight off that this is the tale of a love that's been lost, and the sole dramatic question is, Will Tom get over it? (You're like a prequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall.) Tom is the one we're meant to bond with, and that's your main strategy. You're a woman's movie for guys: romance from the sensitive male's POV. Hey, ladies, you think we don't care? Think we don't hurt?

Think we don't like old songs and movies? Tom and Summer are in their 20s, yet their pop touchstones are the Beatles and other relics from the '60s (Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends," Nancy Sinatra's "Sugar Town"), '70s (Bruce Springsteen) and '80s (Patrick Swayze's "She's Like the Wind" and Hall & Oates' "You Make My Dreams," which cues a full musical-production number). Summer's first clue that Tom is a potential soul mate comes when she hears the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" on his iPod, with the mournful lyrics, "And if a double-decker bus/ Crashes into us,/ To die by your side/ Is such a heavenly way to die." Also from the Euro playlist is an old French love ballad, sung by French President Nicolas Sarkozy's model wife Carla Bruni! In your song selection you're like a politician who makes sure to kiss babies of every race, color and creed.

Your cinematic templates are just as antique. Tom says his idea of romantic conquest is "based on a total misreading of the movie The Graduate." You throw in references to scenes from that 1967 film and to The Producers (1968) and Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979). When Tom imagines a movie of his affair, it's in the style of art films from the '50s and '60s: Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, François Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine Feminine. After a while, I began to think that 500DOS was about not Tom's young life, or the 30s-ish filmmakers', but mine. And I'm no Gen Y baby.

You probably cast Deschanel, who recently played the free spirit to Jim Carrey's Yes Man, because you know I was beguiled by her — the wide blue eyes, the lovely blank face and secret smile — back in 2003 with David Gordon Green's first-love story All The Real Girls. Thanks for that, and for letting her shine through her character's opacity. But now my loyalty has shifted to Gordon-Levitt, which was surely part of your plan, since he's your figure of identity and sympathy. On camera since he was a kid, co-starring in the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun, he's come of age most becomingly; as the teen sleuth in the Raymond Chandler–y Brick he showed his budding star quality. And now he makes Tom the sunniest sap in the history of unrequited love. You'd be much harder to take if he weren't your sail and anchor.

And yet I resist you. I detect a cool calculation in your chocolate Valentine heart. Your tone is a little self-conscious and preening. You're like the girl or guy who's been most popular at school since kindergarten: you'd be cuter if you didn't know you were so darned cute. I suspect that you're at least as much in love with yourself as Tom is with Summer. Maybe I'm just suspicious of your superficial take on romantic obsession. You make the whole process — the appetite loss, that strange warm-sick feeling, the borderline stalking, the whole splendid misery of surrendering to someone who tolerates but doesn't totally reciprocate — seem essentially narcissistic. Tom may be less in love with Summer than he is with the very notion of love. Which is his notion. And Summer, the object of his affection, is just that: an object. Since we're never inside her head, we don't know what drives her to reject the precious gift of Tom's love. She has no independent existence; she's just something Tom has to have. She may as well be a first edition of Action Comics, or a girl on a porn site. And because the emotional drama is so one-sided, I just can't love you.

I guess maybe I'm not Tom but Summer. I like your looks, and heaven knows I appreciate the energy you put into wooing me, but I don't want us to be a couple. So be well, stay swell, have a nice multiplex run, and maybe we'll get together at the Box Office Weekend Report.

PS: Have you seen The Hurt Locker? (Read TIME's review.) I'm so mad for that movie that I could dance down the street. (Hope that didn't hurt your feelings.)

• Richard Corliss
• You've got a lot going for you, (500) Days of Summer, with your winsome Zooey Deschanel and your captivating Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And yet, I resist you