In a basement somewhere in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley there sits a machine. If you were to feed this machine a DVD of Annie Hall, a cool kid's iPod, a book about 21st century hipster culture and a Fox Searchlight logo, it would output 500 Days of Summer. Which isn't to say that 500 Days of Summer is a bad movie - it by no means is bad, and aside from a few minor quibbles I don't have many truly negative things to say about the film - but it is a fairly unoriginal, quite conventional movie that is designed to specifically appeal to people who think they're very original and not at all conventional.

The film is a semi-non-linear (it jumps between two time tracks, each of which is individually linear) look at a relationship that doesn't work out. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Tom, a greeting card writer with aspirations of being an architect. Zooey Deschanel is Summer, the new secretary at the office, and the film begins with the day he first meets her, goes through the beginning stages of their relationship, the ending, the post-breakup depression and finally how Tom rebuilds himself. 500 Days of Summer doesn't break the fourth wall in the same way that Annie Hall does, but it plays with form in similar ways - there's a sketched scene, a spontaneous dance number, a split-screen showing what Tom hopes will happen in a particular scene versus what really does happen. These scenes are almost all clever and work (one scene where Tom is watching foreign films and sees himself in them fails utterly - the joke is so old and so tired that it's hard to imagine anybody thinking that a joke about The Seventh Seal chess game is funny post Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey), and the entire film is charming, funny and amiable.

But it's missing something bigger at the center. Levitt is actually pretty great as Tom, but he's up against Zooey Deschanel, an actress I've come to reevaluate in the last few months. Deschanel is beautiful and watchable, but she has no energy. Scratch that - she absorbs energy from the scene around her. I would swear that I saw lights dimming as she walks under them. I'm simply coming to think that Deschanel is a supporting actress in a lead actress' body. And while director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber learned a lot from obvious rewatchings of Annie Hall (and probably Eternal Sunshine), what they didn't learn was to give Summer a real character. She's a blank, which at first is part of the point, but while Tom gets to know her, we never do. She's an object, not a person, and that makes it hard understand why he loves her so deeply. The script gives her quirks - Ringo is her favorite Beatle because he's nobody's favorite Beatle! - but not depth. And when the time comes to give her depth, when she tells Tom a story she's never told anyone else, we don't get to hear it. Even when Tom follows advice to take another look at the relationship to find the bad, all we get are scenes where Summer is obviously on the verge of breaking up with him, not scenes that show why Summer maybe wasn't his soul mate. We never get to really understand Summer's soul at all.

I do want to take a moment to congratulate Webb on creating a nice alternate Los Angeles where people walk the streets and take the bus and subway. He shoots places that have rarely been shot in this wildly overshot town, and it actually took me about 20 minutes to nail down that this was supposed to be Los Angeles. The film itself is lovely and features some really terrific urban photography, showing parts of downtown LA in ways that I had never before seen them.

Too bad there's nothing else here as original. While the film is ultimately amiable and feels mightily commercial (and features the best Han Solo cameo in history), it feels like a product of the modern reference phase of cinema. 500 Days of Summer feels like a movie made by somebody who sees life through movies; while I don't doubt that many of the events in the film are autobiographical on someone's part - they're often generic enough to feel autobiographical for anyone in the audience who has ever been dumped - they all are filtered through other movies or songs or TV shows. At one point Tom complains that modern pop music and movies have skewed what we expect from love, but a complete immersion in pop culture seems to have also skewed this movie away from having any real feelings or thoughts of its own. A fine date film, a movie that will likely hit big and make a bunch of money and sell a bunch of soundtracks and a movie that will announce a director with a very slick, studio-oriented style who will get a ton of work, 500 Days of Summer will only end up as well regarded as its influences by people who haven't seen them.

7.5 out of 10