12 Movies That Tricked You Into Thinking They Had Happy Endings
11. (500) Days Of Summer - Tom's Stuck In A Cycle
The Allegedly Happy Ending: Chronicling Joseph Gordon Levitts Tom's obsession with Zooey Deschanel's Summer, (500) Days Of Summer busts open a lot of the myths Hollywood pumps out about modern relationships. At times brutally honest, it purports to show Tom's formative relationship, with the character slowly becoming aware of the misrepresentations about love hes been fed throughout his life.
At the end of the year and four months, Tom is fully reformed and on a brighter life path, topped off by him meeting the beautiful, ironically-named Autumn.
The Depressing Truth: Although the Autumn reveal is kinda cute, it undoes all the progress the character has been through in the previous ninety minutes. As the film literally shows (the day counter goes back to zero) he's right back where he started.
Maybe it's a little naive of us to expect one experience to totally change a lifetime and certainly a little conceited to find fault in human emotion, but isnt it a little against the flow? You feel like director Marc Webb knew this when making the film, but the endings dressed in such optimism it's lost in all that Smiths.