Director: Charlie McDowell Starring: Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie, Emily Matthews, Ingvar E. Sigurdsson Running Time: 90 minutes
There’s a quote from one of Tove Jansson’s delightful Moomin books that I have always adored: “The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can… Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst.” I’ve always felt that it spoke to the idea of the later years of one’s life being defined by safeguarding the family we have gathered in our life, and one which I believe speaks directly to the approach of director Charlie McDowell and actor Glenn Close in this adaptation of Jansson’s 1972 novel of the same name.
The Summer Book follows Sophia (Matthews), a young girl who spends the summer after her mother’s death on a small island in the Gulf of Finland with her grief-stricken Father (Danielsen Lie) and her wily and wise Grandmother (Close). As her father struggles to lift himself from his despondency, Sophia must find daily entertainment from her aging Grandmother. This is in spite of her grandmother’s advancing age, and growing weariness with the drudgery of existence in her twilight years. Close’s character does her best to keep up with Sophia, broaden her mind, and heal her fraying relationship with her father, but we can also tell that she is tired. “I’m trying”, Danielsen Lie’s character weakly protests to her when she chastises his lack of effort with Sophia. “Not hard enough,” Grandmother replies, “and I won’t be here forever.”
Though the novel is told from Sophia’s point-of-view, McDowell wisely alternates focus between Sophia and Grandmother, allowing us a chance to see both Sophia’s growing understanding and acceptance of the world and her Grandmother’s growing resentment of it. The strength of these two performances are the key to the film’s success. Emily Matthews, in her first acting role, is impressively natural as Sophia, engaging with the beauty of Sophia’s world with vigour and never overplaying the more childish and petulant moments. Close, an actor whose recent run of performances have been met with derision from many critics, is, quite simply, phenomenal. Always a magnetic performer when at her peak, she produces a performance of both beauty and sadness which elicits something from the audience that I doubt many films before have accomplished: a desire to see a character die out of love rather than hatred.
After venturing into genre with his previous two films for Netflix, The Discovery and Windfall, Charlie McDowell returns to the patient, experiential filmmaking of his debut, The One I Love. The camera lingers on the Finnish landscape, drinking in its ethereal beauty, and also showing us how the narrow perimeters of the family’s island act as a restriction on Sophia’s curious young mind and an added burden on Grandmother’s consuming feelings of confinement and restlessness. In a sense, it feels as if we are watching hi-res home movie snippets, such as the ones which play over the credits featuring Tove Jansson herself. This un-showy style of shooting and editing allows us to focus on the heady central question of the film: “How long can we live for others when we don’t want to live for ourselves?” It’s a tricky question to be confronted with at a three-thirty p.m. festival screening on a Monday afternoon.
The Summer Book will not be to everyone’s taste. It’s a slow ninety minutes with only one truly dramatic sequence (a storm near the film’s climax). The film’s empathy is quite striking also, and although it is not an insistent or forceful film, its reckoning with grief, aging and death may provoke complicated feelings in its audience, particularly if they have lost an elderly family member whom they were close to, or if they lost a parent at a young age. However, the unintentional transgressive nature of the film is to its advantage in my opinion. I imagine that many people will come away from it, as I did, feeling a deeper understanding of what it means to, as Jansson wrote, “protect and secure things” so that “the storms can do their worst,” and also with renewed appreciation for the grace and proficiency of Glenn Close’s acting talents for what will hopefully be recognised as one of the most accomplished performances of the latter half of her career.
Ultimately, we can live our entire lives for others, but we can only die for ourselves.
(4 / 5)