Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel “The Summer Book” wasn’t a memoir, but it was a memory piece of sorts — its slender narrative of largely unspoken grief and healing imbued with, and enriched by, the author’s palpable feeling for its remote Gulf of Finland island setting, where she herself maintained a rustic holiday house. That it’s taken over half a century for this well-loved book to reach the screen isn’t altogether surprising: That level of subtextual authorial attachment makes it a challenge to film, as does its spare, outwardly low-stakes storytelling. In his fourth feature, American filmmaker Charlie McDowell makes an equally respectful and respectable stab at the task, capturing some of the wistful, soft-sun warmth of Jansson’s writing — though not quite matching its unassuming poetic depths.
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The presence of Glenn Close — radiating creased, quiet benevolence as a weary grandmother anchoring a potentially pained family vacation — will be the chief selling point of “The Summer Book” as it makes its way into the world following its world premiere at the London Film Festival. But this isn’t a film in thrall to star power, or indeed any cinematic bells and whistles: A late-summer thunderstorm, briefly menacing but causing no ultimate harm, represents the closest thing to a dramatic peak in screenwriter Robert Jones’s faithfully low-key adaptation. Some viewers will be frustrated by the gossamer plotting in a film that seeks to conjure an air of interior calm rather than any kind of thrill. But devoted fans of Jansson, the Finnish author better known for her Moomins books for children, will be delighted that her delicately personal work hasn’t been punched up.
It begins with a sense of passage into another world, where time is slower and the days longer, as the prow of a small wooden motorboat cuts purposefully through glinting waters, ever farther from urban reality. Lying atop it, observantly drinking in every moment, is nine-year-old Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews), a sensitive, imaginative girl who’s insatiably curious about her changing surroundings. Accompanied by her father (Anders Danielsen Lie) and his mother (Close), Sophia is bound for a secluded shoreside cottage that has been in the family for generations, and where every summer of her short life thus far has been spent. But it all feels dauntingly new and unfamiliar without her mother, whom we surmise has passed away in the last year, and whose conspicuous absence nobody exactly knows how to address.
Sophia’s father, a soft-spoken illustrator, retreats into his work, pushing his feelings down so deep within himself that his daughter begins to fear he no longer loves her. In his relative emotional absence, Sophia’s grandmother is left to do the work of two parents, thinking up no end of activities to keep the girl’s lively mind occupied, and serving as a constant conversational partner, ever-ready with an answer to questions that range from trivial to whimsical to searching. No phones or computers here: The film’s eminently analog period is suggested solely by their absence. The characters’ nubbly Nordic knitwear, necessary even on a summer’s eve, feels more like a constant.
A pragmatic, self-sufficient type, the grandmother at one point tartly chides her son for excessive self-pity, but she’s consistently gentle with Sophia — humoring her flights of fancy and guiding her toward playful distractions, but also encouraging the girl to solve her own problems, candid about the fact that she won’t be around much longer. Attentive to characterful details of accent and posture, Close plays this tender-tough old bird beautifully, resisting twinkly sentimentality while maintaining a palpably affectionate rapport with Matthews, who’s appealingly restless but not overly precocious in her screen debut.
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It’s in the grandmother’s moments to herself, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes on the porch at dusk or haltingly hobbling her way across a landscape she once darted through as a girl, that her face silently clouds with darker anxieties: fear, perhaps, for the shape of her beloved family when only two remain. Yet as the summer progresses, raw wounds begin to scab over, as father and daughter begin to truly see each other once more — though the film, restrained to the last, holds off on any grandly cathartic embraces or gestures of reconciliation. Danielsen Lie, always welcome on screen, gets less to do than his female co-stars, but the film counts considerably on his tacit, reserved decency as a performer.
An unexpected departure from the cool genre workings of his previous features, most recently the Netflix neo-noir “Windfall,” McDowell’s film doesn’t always find the spiritual echo in such physical aspects that Jansson’s sneakily haunting book does: A new poplar tree planted amid the rocks, as a gesture of faith in the future, is as mawkishly demonstrative as things get. Indeed, “The Summer Book” is a film mostly besotted with the craggly pebble beaches, pine-needle carpets and stonewashed skies of its landscape, all exquisitely shot by the great Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (“Victoria,” “Another Round”) in compositions focused less on sweeping postcard perfection than the particular, tactile details of light and texture that come to color lifelong memories.
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