How to save your movie

I've fallen pretty hard on my posts, just like I thought I would. Now rather than posting every Sunday, I'm just going to post whenever I have the time and an idea, with the goal of one post per week. With that being said I do have a post here, somewhere.


The following may contain spoilers for the movie mentioned. Read at your own risk.


I just finished watching (500) Days of Summer (yeah, I'm behind on my movies, so sue me). What struck me as I was watching it, is that this movie should be horrible. From the little back story I have on it, the screenwriter (whose name I won't bother to look up) wrote it based on his relationship with a girl who didn't want any serious relationship with anyone, was up front about it, and yet the guy still didn't listen to what she said. With that in mind, the main character Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Mary Sue to the nth degree. As far as I can tell, the writer just put himself in the story. This is really the first warning sign. 


When a writer makes himself the main character of a story, you can usually bet the ending will be extremely positive for the protagonist or extremely negative for the antagonist. It's not even a particularly bad thing, when done well, but that is rare. What you usually end up with is the main character being put through trials that seem pointless and even self-inflicted with a resolution that could have been achieved long before the audience ever got involved. 


Another side effect of Mary Sue-itis (yes, it is inflamed) is a whinny main character.* Being the victim is easy. When you're looking at the world from only one point of view, it's easy to see how everything is stacked against you: your boss is mean, your landlord is lazy, nothing goes right, people never help you succeed. It is something we all do. There's probably a lot of physiology behind it, but the bottom line is that no matter how much we do it ourselves, we are only annoyed by it when others do it. Maybe it's just part of the human condition: "I am the only victim in this world; everyone else has it better." 


The last side effect of this problem is static characters. The main character never really learns a lesson.** Even though he seems, near the end, to have learned, any change hinted at by the writer is thrown out the window at the first sign of a happy resolution. This is easy for the writer to do because the character is so much like him that he would rather the character be happy than give the character a proper ending.


The other warning sign, albeit the one you don't see until the end, is that the movie contradicts itself under the guise of irony. At the beginning, after stating that it is not a love story, the movie presents itself as the antithesis to '50's and '60's Motown love songs and to romantic comedies. The truth: it definantly is a romantic comedy. Romantic comedies  are films with light-hearted, humorous plotlines, centered on romantic ideals such as a true love able to surmount most obstacles (Wikipedia). It neither attempts to prove or disprove this assertion, but still deals with love and it's effects. 


We have a semi-intelligent writer who has been spurned by a woman and come up with a lame character that ultimately learns nothing and barely moves on. Ostensibly this should be a bad movie, yet I enjoyed it and would at least recommend others watch it too. What gives? Basically: good dialog. 


(500) Days' (and its writer's) saving grace is conversations between characters. They are witty, engaging and funny enough to elicit a laugh. Had the writer put enough work into the plot and characters as he did into the conversations, the movie would be worth multiple viewings. When the characters interact, I can seem them as real people, whereas by themselves, the strings are visible.


Even with the good dialog between characters, it is still hard to miss the final problem: there are no real supporting characters. Other than the two main characters, every other person in the movie serves as a plot device or commentary on the situation. None of them is real in that they have a life outside of the plot.


So what is there to learn from the movie? 1) Avoid making yourself the main character, 2) Good dialog will do wonders for your writing, 3) Make all of your characters as real as possible, and 4) Only be ironic when it serves a purpose other that irony.


*Because some of the supporting characters do notice that Tom has problems and is being whinny, I would be willing to concede that the writer is poking some fun at himself, but only to an extent. The downtrodden Tom that most of the movie revolves around is proof that the writer wanted to complain rather than tell his story truthfully.


*So Tom is able to move on, but I'm not really counting that as a lesson; it's a plot device.