Falling in love - elevating an average person, through joyful self-delusion, to a status above all others - is a perverse process. With a glorious censoring of all that might be bland, trite or commonplace about them, you transform one of millions into one in a million.
Occasionally, with the same baffling irrationality, film critics do the same with movies. Marc Webb's romcom (500) Days of Summer - an exploration of a failed relationship between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a waif-like creative with an idealised view of romance, and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a rent-a-bob indie girl with neither the need or desire for a committed relationship - is the latest supposed stunner to make journalists go gaga.
Critics (including some on this paper) are in a dopamine-addled rush to praise the film as an "alt-romcom". "Alt" because it's primarily about Tom's heartbreak and because the film switches back and forth between different stages of the relationship, giving us a disjointed collage of Tom and Summer's time together. Those who have fallen for it think these narrative fancies give (500) Days an "uncommon honesty and invention", a "winning sweetness" and the potential to be "this generation's Annie Hall".
Hyperbole like this is rife in every field of criticism, but it's understandable that minor innovation within the restrictive romcom territory prompts film critics to become more passionate than usual. This is the genre that made stars of Kate Hudson and Freddie Prinze Jr, a genre where films that try to do more than offer the audience a vicarious taste of those heady first days of love (real-life breakup exposes like Susan Buice and Arin Crumley's Four-Eyed Monsters, for instance) are buried by sugary sentiment on a blockbuster scale.
(500) Days of Summer is a warm and witty film. It looks pretty, seems smart and could fool you into loving it in the short-term. But it also subscribes to too many romcom cliches to be called innovative. It is not the controversial comment on gender politics director Webb thinks it is. Sex is treated in standard romcom style (ie there isn't any) and despite its plethora of cute fantasy sequences, it is nowhere near inventive enough to earn the Annie Hall tag. Mainly, it does not better anything that has been done before. But these bland, trite and common parts of the movie have so far been ignored by UK critics. And so it becomes one in a million.
Traditionally, we demand a decent romcom for the summer months (half of the top 20 grossing romantic comedies have been released between June and September) and given the other options available there's no harm in kidding ourselves that (500) Days is The One.
There's no harm in calling it a dreamboat of a movie. Let's just not be surprised when, a few months down the line, it leaves us underwhelmed. When it does, don't be depressed - there'll be other "alt-romcoms". They might even seem as pretty, funny and significant as this one.
