Three generations of a family spend a summer together on a remote island in the wake of a devastating loss.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Charlie McDowell
Starring: Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie, Emily Matthews, Ingvar Sigurdsson
The Finnish author Tove Jansson's greatest legacy is as the creator of the beloved children's characters The Moomins. But she also drew much acclaim for her 1972 novel The Summer Book, a poetic study of grief in a very Nordic tradition. It seems strange that it has taken so long for a cinematic adaptation, and stranger still that it is an American (Charlie McDowell) rather than Scandinavian filmmaker who has brought this tale to the screen.
Despite the presence of a Hollywood star in Glenn Close, McDowell's film could well be confused with a product of Northern European cinema, tapping into that emotionally icy part of the world's difficulty in verbalising the things that really matter. A movie about people who refuse to speak is a challenge to a filmmaker. McDowell takes a good crack at it, but his visual storytelling is a little too focussed on the film's location rather than his characters' faces.
That setting is admittedly very photogenic, a small island in the Gulf of Finland. It's there we find the summer cabin of an artist (Anders Danielsen Lie, credited only as "Father") who arrives with his elderly mother (Close, credited only as "Grandmother") and his six-year-old daughter Sophia (Emily Matthews). The absence of any modern technology and the perennially fashionable Nordic knitwear suggests the movie could be set in the same 1970s time period as the novel, or simply the island is timeless with its lack of internet intrusion.
The family have clearly spent regular summers here, but this is the first time as a trio rather than a quartet. Sophia's mother has recently passed away, and all three generations are trying to process their loss in their own quiet ways. On arrival at the cabin, Father spots his late wife's hat and immediately scuttles it away, an early indication of how he is unable to face his grief head on. His silence has led his daughter to believe that he no longer cares for her. And he certainly seems unable to look her in the eyes, maybe because she has the eyes of the woman he lost.
The three characters dance around their grief, but so too does the movie. It has a similar setup as recent dramas like Blue Heron and Summer 1993, focussing as it does on a confused child while a tragedy plays out among the adults around her. But it doesn't have the grit or melancholy of either of those movies. It is a little too gentle for its own good, a middlebrow take on the subject of grief that seems cautious not to upset its audience too much.
Its strongest asset is undoubtedly Close, whose quietly captivating performance makes up for the lack of substance elsewhere. Buried under heavy make-up and adopting a Scandinavian accent, her performance might trigger warnings for those intolerant of ham, but Close wisely underplays the role. She has nailed the distinctive squint of a woman who has spent close to a century staring into the bright Northern sun, decades of acquired wisdom reflected in her eyes. Hers is the sort of face that draws you to a National Geographic cover on a crowded newsstand. Grandmother's main concern is that she might pass herself before her son and granddaughter have recovered from their current loss, and Close carries the weight of this worry on her hunched shoulders and in the lines of her face.
Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen turns every corner of the island, and every late evening sunset, into a mountable frame. It is a beautifully composed film, but the viewer's desire to book a trip to the setting clouds the movie's central theme. It's commendable that the grief here is left largely unspoken, but McDowell isn't a strong enough visual filmmaker to etch that grief onto his pretty images. The Summer Book is more travelogue than elegy.
The Summer Book is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 7th.
