Producers: Kath Mattock, Kevin Loader, Alex Orlovsky, Duncan Montgomery, Aleksi Bardy, Helen Vinogradov, Glenn Close and Charlie McDowell Director: Charlie McDowell Screenplay: Robert Jones Cast: Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie, Emily Matthews, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Pekka Strang, Sophia Heikkilä and Theo Zilliacus Distributor: Music Box Films
Grade: C+
The 1972 novel by Finnish artist and author Tove Jansson that serves as the inspiration for Charlie McDowell’s film is a period coming-of-age piece about a young girl and her widowed father coming to terms with the death of her mother while spending the summer months on the family’s vacation home on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. Father and daughter are not alone, however: they’re accompanied by his aged mother, who, conscious of her own impending death, is intent on helping them reconnect emotionally before her departure.
Grandma is played by Glenn Close, and it’s her wisdom that’s integral to bringing her son (Anders Danielsen Lie), a writer whose grief leads him to brood on his loss and concentrate on his work, to open himself up again to little Sophia (Emily Matthews), while aiding the girl to understand that despite her father’s detached attitude, he still loves her.
As paced by McDowell and edited by Jussi Rautaniemi, this is basically a slow-moving three-character chamber piece; the only other people to appear are Eriksson (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a cranky old fellow who delivers a box with fireworks for a private Midsommar celebration (along with a black cat that becomes a pet for Sophia) and the Malanders (Pekka Strang and Sophia Heikkilä, along with their son Theo Zilliacus), whose modernist new house on a nearby island Grandma and Sophia visit on a brief excursion, their dismissal of a no trespassing sign happily overlooked by the family.
Otherwise the film focuses on Grandma’s attempt to manipulate the situation, particularly through conversations with Sophia that raise memories of her own past (she was instrumental, for example, in opening the scouting experience to girls) while discussing fundamental issues—life, death, family—with her granddaughter. But there’s one episode in which Sophia’s father is also involved. The three go on a boating trip to another island with an abandoned lighthouse that Sophia investigates while her father remaining lolling in the boat. A storm comes up and Sophia and Grandma take refuge in a nearby house while he struggles to bring the boat to shore; the girl feels guilty since she’d hoped for a storm to arise during the journey to the island, which she’d found excruciatingly dull.
“The Summer Book” is also a picture-postcard kind of movie, filled with shots of sunrises and sunsets in which the light dances lightly over the ocean waves, often blinding the lens of cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen. It’s a striking effect which, unfortunately, is repeated a mite too often. But the location is a pretty one, traversed by Sophia and Grandma at length (the symbolic importance of the moss native to the island becomes a major theme) and Lina Nordqvist’s production design as well as Tiina Kaukanen’s costumes are evocative, though the time isn’t explicitly indicated. (The songs Grandma hums and plays on an old phonograph suggest sometime earlier in the twentieth century.) Hania Rani’s background score, with its use of single instruments—harp, glockenspiel, piano—at important points, is also attractive, though it feels rather precious.
The center of the film lies in the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother, and Close is quite fine in the latter part, both convincingly frail and yet rock-solid. Matthews, on the other hand, is agreeably unaffected but not especially touching; perhaps the page-boy hairdo that makes her look like a miniature Prince Valiant is too much of a distraction. Of the secondary players Danielsen Lie is no better than average and the others are mere walk-ons (Zilliacus isn’t even granted a line), but the feline that plays Fluffy is striking in its few appearances.
Gentle and meditative, this will undoubtedly appeal to admirers of Jansson’s novel and of Glenn Close’s acting, but while evocative of time and place its deliberate pace and emphasis on visual prettiness eventually become enervating.