At roughly the two-thirds mark of Charlie McDowell’s ultra gentle, nature-mediated fourth feature “The Summer Book,” one of the main characters, nine-year-old Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews), prays as her father (Anders Danielsen Lie) steers her and her octogenarian grandmother ( Glenn Close ) on a motor boat in the open waters of the Gulf of Finland. Sophia pleads, “Dear God, I’m bored as beef. Please let something happen. A storm! Anything!”
Curiously, audiences might be making the same request, as there is precious little plot or overt characterization in this tepid, languorous adaptation of beloved Finnish author Tove Jansson’s classic 1972 novel of the same name. This isn’t to say that the film lacks in hardy character or gorgeous idyllic cinematography. In fact, a grounded meditative island beauty — lent by silken picturization of reeds, moss, rocks, and dappled sunlight on ripples of ocean, as well as by a soundscape of a late twentieth century Nordic seaside — suffuses the moviemaking as well as the outlook of the grieving family of three that has arrived to spend the summer in their modest cabin on an islet in a minor Finnish archipelago. The film just lacks in, you know, tension, danger, build, and stakes, the hallmarks of dramatic narrative. It’s almost as though the word “mellifluous,” pertaining to Hania Rani’s score, was coined for this film.
McDowell isn’t just philandering with pulchritude though, he seems genuinely interested in how communion with nature and a season in a faraway home can help this family cope with grief. Sophia feels her father doesn’t love her since her mother’s recent passing. Lie’s unnamed character is aloof and distant; he might share cabin space but he makes few overtures of compassion towards his daughter. Donning faded sweaters and a comely beard, he goes about his sojourn with a fragile demeanor similar to the one that helped bend his character’s shattering arc in the brilliant 2011 Joachim Trier film, “Oslo, August 31st.” He’s only once admonished by his mother to not “stink” too much of self-pity.
Indeed, the film’s secret weapon — a word altogether too violent for someone whose granddaughter lauds her as a “moss fanatic” — is Glenn Close, aka Grandmother. Specifically, it is her steady gaze and calm repose, her weathered wrinkles (props to makeup designer Riikka Virtanen and Close’s makeup artist, Chloe Sens) and most notably, the bend of her back effected by a lifetime of intelligent hunches that make her the most sturdy member of the family, not a matriarch as much as a seer, her diminishing eyesight still far reaching.
If there is anything Grandmother is weary about, it’s the onslaught of “time on top of time.” That’s a fear she concedes to only in private moments cuddled with Sophia, a preteen soaking in her elder’s every mannerism and medicinal wisdom via incessant questioning or insistence on adventure. With the aid of a walking stick, Close’s hunched frame and spry walk literally lend the proceedings an arc, as though the shape an actor makes with their body becomes a curvature and thus an aperture through which the impatient audience can suddenly glimpse McDowell’s project: a sense-led exploration of a time tucked away, experienced equitably among humans, less tactile organisms, and the universal forces that generate the night and the tides.
Once glimpsed, the film’s sunken emotions become more palpable. Characters’ arcs, even if tentative, become conspicuous. Sophia comes to question God, hate the concept of family, fear the divinity of storms on open waters, and gradually reconcile with the state of her father, as she stares down through an aperture from the attic, processing him draw on his somber desk. She comes to conclude she likes it when he is working because at least then she knows where he is. Grandmother nods along: we float among the moss of life, the algae and the seaweed of these Finnish summertime waters. If we stamp on moss too much, we merely stamp on ourselves.
A certain folk northernness permeates the axioms of this story world. You are untouchable, as in, people don’t have to touch you. You can visit but not feel obliged to enter. You don’t owe anyone anything, except the land and always, moss. This radical philosophy keeps us at a remove, as it does Sophia, too young to know if she believes.
Still, the emotions, even when they gather shape like the storm clouds Sophia prays for, don’t make for a complete, let alone satisfying story. A scene where Grandmother walks resolutely in the nude among the reeds is too brief to be affirming. A moment of fear where her own reflections scare Sophia is tonally misleading. When his motor boat stops working in the midst of the storm, Father’s anger at the elements is too little release too late.
In addition, McDowell and writer Robert Jones don’t commit to lending the adaptation a distinctive form. “The Summer Book” is not a memoir, coming of age drama or hybrid nature documentary. Neither is it stitched by vignettes nor ensconced by the crafts of atmospheric immersion. It is sensorial without being a hymn to the senses. Unlike films set in islands such as “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring,” which etched conflict marvelously into its persuasive cinematic grammar of serenity, or “The Red Turtle,” which levitated its wordlessness with willful conflict, “The Summer Book”’s gentleness doesn’t have an offset.
To be fair, it doesn’t pander, preach, or become sentimental either, and is content to be its own chipped gem stuck in time. Reviewing the book for The Guardian in 2003, Ali Smith wrote, “Jansson’s brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string… Her writing is all magical deception… the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.”
While “lights on a string” might be too glowing a praise for the filmic adaptation (if only because a celebrated 2024 film has a soaring ending with this very image), “The Summer Book” dispels with fuss, ego, or bravado. Close’s Grandmother pees on a rock and arches her back, almost defiant in face of sunrise. Age nor the shallows of her breathing will wrinkle the pages of her book of the seasons.
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Grade: B-
“The Summer Book” screened at AFI Fest 2024 after premiering at the BFI London Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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