there are two ways to answer “what was your favorite movie when you were 20?”
you can name the movie from that year you currently believe is the best, after another seventeen years of watching films, acquiring opinions, and becoming the sort of person who knows when a director is “interrogating” something. or you can answer honestly and identify the movie that got you then.
for me, in 2009, that movie was (500) Days of Summer.
a movie precision-engineered for being 20 in 2009
(500) Days of Summer arrived carrying nearly every signifier that could activate a 20-year-old in 2009: the Smiths, greeting-card melancholy, architecture as an abandoned dream, Zooey Deschanel’s bangs, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in narrow ties, nonlinear editing, and an elaborate Hall & Oates dance number presented as an emotional weather report.
it did not merely have a soundtrack. it had a soundtrack that seemed designed to be imported into iTunes, burned onto a CD for somebody you were pretending not to be in love with, and then listened to while staring out the passenger-side window like your suburb had been photographed by an unusually sympathetic cinematographer.
the movie understood that being 20 means your feelings are both completely ordinary and, somehow, the first time they have ever occurred in human history. everybody has been rejected. nobody has been rejected with this particular Regina Spektor song playing.
the embarrassing luxury of identifying with tom
the first time through, it is remarkably easy to accept Tom’s version of events. he is sad, he has excellent taste according to a very specific 2009 rubric, and the movie is literally assembled from his memories. the camera gives his disappointment production design. even his depression has an aesthetic department.
but the film tells you, repeatedly, that he is unreliable. Summer says what she wants. Tom hears what he hopes she will eventually want after enough exposure to his personality. he mistakes shared music taste for metaphysical compatibility, which is a deeply 20-year-old error and, regrettably, not one that expires automatically at 21.
watching it now, the “expectations versus reality” sequence feels less like a clever formal trick and more like the whole thesis arriving with labels. Tom is not devastated because Summer secretly promised him a future. he is devastated because he treated his imagined future like a contract she had failed to honor.
your favorite then does not have to be your favorite now
this is where the social-media prompt became more interesting than a simple list of 2009 releases. there are movies from that year I may rank higher now. that is not quite the same question.
a favorite movie is sometimes a time capsule with a runtime. it preserves who you were when you encountered it: which jokes landed, which clothes looked aspirational, which flaws in a protagonist still read as romantic damage instead of a warning label, and which songs could make an ordinary elevator ride feel like destiny had finally started paying attention.
revisiting that movie is not a test you pass by having the correct updated opinion. you are allowed to notice what aged badly, what you misunderstood, and what remains annoyingly effective. critical distance is useful, but it does not need to arrive carrying bolt cutters.
the film survived its own aesthetic
late-aughts indie culture has become easy to parody because it was already halfway to parody while it was happening. there were birds on things. every apartment had a vintage typewriter owned by someone who did not type. men believed that liking the Smiths qualified as emotional availability.
(500) Days of Summer contains all of that, but it has lasted because its structure is smarter than its accessories. memory is nonlinear. heartbreak is an editor who keeps cutting back to the scene that supports its preferred argument. eventually, if you are lucky, the footage gets recut.
at 20, I saw a stylish movie about the devastation of wanting someone who did not want the same thing. now I see a movie about the danger of confusing your narration with reality. both readings were sitting there. I was simply seated closer to one of them.
so, yes: my answer is still (500) Days of Summer. not necessarily because it would win a carefully administered ranking today, but because “favorite movie when I was 20” belongs partly to the 20-year-old who answered it first.
unfortunately, he gets a vote.