Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

This month I’m taking a look at movies that seem to have defined my generation but I missed anyway. So I’ll start off with one that’s been at the top of my list of movies I feel left out about for over a decade and a half.
All I really know about this movie is that it’s about a relationship, I think it goes badly, and it’s one of the defining movies of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character archetype, the millennial-coded hipster free spirit love icon. Also I know it as the movie that made it apparent that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to continue his acting career as an adult.

After watching the movie:

Tom Hansen grew up idolizing 60s British pop music, especially The Smiths, and believing in love. He went to school as an architect, but ended up working as a greeting card writer, where nothing remarkable happened until his boss hired a new secretary named Summer, who Tom finds gorgeous but assumes she’s not social and tries to put out of his mind until they start to bond over The Smiths. Tom wants a relationship, Summer doesn’t want to be tied down, but they form a loose relationship made up of what could be described as dates and sex. Tom has the perfect relationship, until she tells him they should stop seeing each other, and his life completely falls apart.

In the last few years I’ve been hearing rumblings that this is a movie that people love for all the wrong reasons, and I can see why, because in 2009, I would have been one of those people. I wasn’t a music aficionado like Tom, but I was slotted into my own interests and made connections through them that I built relationships on top of that were more precarious than I realized. I would have been more sympathetic to Tom in 2009, but I came to this movie in 2024 with the more mature perspective that Tom has to earn with months of depression, and the way he reminds me of myself is embarrassing. I at least never acted out in the ways that he does, since in some ways I never got as far down the path he mistook for destiny as he did. I can definitely see a fandom generated around thinking Tom did almost nothing wrong, when he actually made a lot of mistakes that added up to the failure of his relationship, and spent almost a year and a half learning the hard way at the expense of a lot of angst on his and Summer’s parts. Maybe I’m being too hard on Tom because I see who I wanted to be at the time, so I have to wonder if all that pain is necessary to become a better partner, and all I can say for sure is that at least to the degree of messiness that we see here, it’s not.

This story is told out of order, which makes it seem more important. It may be loosely structured around Tom reminiscing about his perfect relationship from his misery, but it doesn’t feel grounded enough in the later days to seem like the end of the story is the frame for the beginning and middle. The day that each sequence occurs is clearly labeled, but numbers don’t stick in my head very well so I had a little trouble following the order of events and got confused about the timing of a key plot point late in the story. I found a handy list of what happens in order of when it happens, and the timeline makes sense, though that advancement is still pretty fast.

What really made me realize just how quirky this movie was going to be though, was Tom’s very little (half-)sister Rachel, still in grade school, being Tom’s voice of reason. She’s delightful in the handful of scenes that she’s in, though by now it’s probably a little overdone to have the most mature character in the story be the actual child. Summer isn’t all that quirky (yelling anatomical terms in a crowded park notwithstanding), but we see a lot of quirky moments that are just the little playful moments of a relationship, especially a young relationship.

This is a beautiful, messy, raw portrait of a youthful misadventure in romance and self-inflicted heartbreak. I can see on first viewing everything Tom did wrong, but I can’t fault the movie for that, because it’s about him messing up and getting better. I can probably fault it for not being clear enough on how and how badly he messed up. The way the movie leaves us, we’re supposed to think Tom is going to get a chance to do it right, but I think it’s more likely he’s going to be better in some ways and mess up in completely different ways because he doesn’t seem like he fully understood the actual problem. But I guess that’s just the process of living, finding new ways to stop screwing up. A never-ending but hopefully improving process.