500 Days of Summer A-

Rated PG-13, In Theatres, 95 minutes

Once every so often someone makes a perfect romantic comedy. When Harry Met Sally comes to mind. Less often, someone makes a perfect movie about love. Eternal Sunshine, say. These are movies that remember that, for each of us—best-case scenario—one romantic relationship ends well. One. In all the rest, no matter the physical attraction, no matter the chemistry, no matter the depth of feeling and exuberance, in the end somebody’s crying. 500 Days of summer isn’t quite as good as Eternal Sunshine, but it is a nearly perfectly realized movie about one of the really good ones that al as most makes it.

Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Tom Hansen an architect doing time at a greeting card company until he gets back to architecting. Indie lovely Zooey Deschanel is Summer Finn, his boss’s new receptionist. In a nice reversal, he’s the doe-eyed romantic and she’s the cynical girl who doesn’t believe in love. She warns him that she’s only in it for a fun, and he believes no one can walk away from something this good. They bond over a love for The Smiths, buildings, and sex. The whole should be too cute for its own good. They pull out every dramatic device in the bag—voice-overs, non-chronological ordering (tracked based on the numbered day since their first encounter) Karaoke sing-a-longs, a dance number in the park, scenes turned to charcoal darawings, short, documentary-like background sketches, and interviews about love with the main characters. Amazingly, the whole conflagration, which should fall like a bad soufflé, is light as air. It totally works, because the love affair at the heart of it works.

If 500 Days of Summer has a flaw, it’s that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel have too much sizzle. They work too well. You buy it too much. They’re having too much fun. You want them too badly to make it. Which means, ultimately, that you hurt too much when, as you knew from the beginning they wouldn’t, they don’t. It’s easy to give Ms. Deschanel all the credit for manufacturing this intangible that masquerades under the label of “chemistry”. She’s been proving at least as far back as Elf that she’s once-in-a-generation adorable. The brown eyes. The wrinkled nose. The throwback clothing and scrubbed face freshness and to-the-bone sweetness that seems to beam out of those eyes. She’s an indie-rock goddess, and here she puts it all in over-drive. From the moment she kisses him in the copy room, poor Gordon-Levitt never stands a chance. And here’s the amazing thing. Joseph Gordon-Levitt keeps up. Aside from a few flashbacks and photo-essays, he’s in every scene. Star-eyed in love. Living off twinkies and whiskey. Longing. Hurt. Dying to meet her then dying to get over her. Through all that, you never tire of him. Never want to scream “buck-up, camper.” Never wonder why she’d mess with him in the first place. You like him and root for him and never tire of his optimism or his depression. If you think that’s not tough, check out Zack Braff’s recent body of work. If Zooey is the reason you come, Joseph is the reason you aren’t disappointed. A-