Joseph Gordon-Levitt is billing his new movie, "(500) Days of Summer," as "an anti-romance," a cinematic riposte to the "silly and dismissible" romantic comedies that Hollywood has been making and marketing to lonely hearts for decades.
The whimsical and bittersweet tale about a regular guy hopelessly smitten with a girl who doesn't quite share the sentiment unfolds in a nonsequential narrative style that jumps forward and backward over the 500 days of their doomed relationship. Shot almost exclusively in and around downtown Los Angeles, the film, in theaters today, tips its hat to unconventional love-story standard-bearers such as "Annie Hall," "The Graduate" and "Two for the Road."
Love is hardly a many splendored thing for greeting card author Tom (Gordon-Levitt) and his girlfriend, Summer (played by Zooey Deschanel). In fact, before the film's first scene -- Tom's plate-smashing reaction to their breakup -- audiences are forewarned by a title card that reads: "This is not a love story."
As Gordon-Levitt explains, his character is hung up on Summer big-time, and director Marc Webb finds countless ways to express Tom's exuberant but often unhealthy infatuation with the capricious Summer, including a full-blown dance sequence with strangers on the street that comes after he spends his first night with her.
"I've been heartbroken before, and I didn't want to make light of it," Gordon-Levitt, 28, said. "As much as the movie does find humor in it, I don't think the laughs have to be shallow."
So when he wasn't feeling a sequence near the end of "(500) Days" in which Tom, wallowing in the loss of Summer, resorts to a self-help book to cope, Gordon-Levitt spoke from his heart.
"[He] said to us, 'I don't know that Tom would really do that. I don't believe any of us would do that,' " screenwriter Scott Neustadter said. The scene was later nixed.
Without Gordon-Levitt there to keep things grounded, "the movie could have exploded," Webb said. "It could have easily turned into something inane."
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Getting started
Gordon-Levitt hasn't always been comfortable being the center of attention. Raised in L.A. by activist parents, he started acting at age 6 and landed the lead in Disney's "Angels in the Outfield" at 13.
After a six-season run as a mouthy alien in a teenager's body on TV's "3rd Rock From the Sun" and several other films, including the 1999 teen comedy "10 Things I Hate About You," starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger, he was burned out.
