Sweet and cute, but capable of so much more. Director Marc Webb, working from a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, tweaks the romance genre by cataloging 500 days in the relationship of a New York City couple in random order (we start in the middle, jump near the end, then back toward the beginning and so on). The format keeps the clichés at bay (even if many of them are still there), while talented leads Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel make a delightful pair (his dance sequence made me wish Webb had gone even further and made a full-on musical). Also disappointing is that for all its ingenuity, (500) Days of Summer still doesn’t have much room for the feminine perspective of Deschanel’s character.
