The Summer Book
Charlie McDowell (2024)
Charlie McDowell (whose parents are Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen) introduced his film at the London Film Festival,describing it as ‘a love letter to nature and human beings and interaction and family … I hope you’ll slow down to watch it and breathe more calmly’. This proved easy – I was soon drowsing. That’s not intended as a cheap shot: I feel slightly guilty for not thinking better of this well-intentioned adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel, first published in 1972. But in order to engage as screen drama, McDowell’s version of The Summer Book needs more than DP Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s often beautiful seascapes and Hania Rani’s intricate music. In the uneventful circumstances, these are rather too dominant.
Jansson’s novel is hardly action-packed in the conventional sense yet it’s not in the least dull. It’s essentially a conversation, between an old woman and a young girl – a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia – who spend a summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. (The film was shot on location in the Finnish archipelago at a time of year when, as McDowell’s intro explained, it was light for around twenty-two hours of the day.) As they explore the island, Sophia and her grandmother talk about life, nature and their dreams – rather less about mortality though both are keenly aware of the recent death of Sophia’s mother. As well as the voices of her two main characters, Jansson’s writer’s voice is also present throughout the book. Charlie McDowell and Robert Jones, who wrote the screenplay, don’t find a way of substituting for, let alone emulating, that voice. This may be the film’s fundamental weakness but it’s not the only one.
Getting Glenn Close to play the grandmother is a coup for McDowell that comes at a cost. Close delivers an acting masterclass, except that, as often with this formidable performer, it’s a masterclass aware of its own mastery. Her benign, weather-beaten face magnetises the camera. She delivers her lines – often comprising words of wisdom – in carefully Scandi-accented English. She skilfully delineates Grandmother’s declining physical powers. You get an increasing sense that the film is about the old woman – or about Glenn Close’s acting prpwess – to the relative exclusion of Emily Matthews’ Sophia, certainly to the exclusion of a third supposedly significant character, Sophia’s widowed father, played by Anders Danielsen Lie. At times, we’re meant to marvel at seventy-seven-year-old Close’s daring: most conspicuously, when, after Grandmother has been swimming, she sheds her costume and walks naked through a sun-drenched wood. In the final minutes, she emerges from her house on the island to commune with nature again – this time by peeing in the great outdoors. After that, she contentedly lays her head on a pillow of rocks and closes her eyes. This is presumably the end of her life and it’s definitely the end of the film. If she has died, it says a lot about The Summer Book that neither Sophia nor her father gets the opportunity to react to the death.
The family trio’s accents are oddly assorted. There’s Glenn Close, an American meticulously pretending to be a Nordic speaker of English; Anders Danielsen Lie, who is a Nordic (Norwegian) speaker of English; and Emily Matthews, who’s English and isn’t asked to suggest anything different. Matthews is likeable and natural but this Sophia looks a good deal older than the six-year-old child of Tove Jansson’s book – too old to be asking some of the questions that she asks in the film. Danielsen Lie, though not given enough to do, expresses, usually, without words, a remarkable burden of lonely melancholy but is also involved in one of the narrative’s rare bits of dramatic incident that’s also its silliest episode.
Feeling bored, Sophia asks God to send a storm to liven up her holiday. The storm arrives during a family trip to a nearby island, which has a now disused lighthouse, though the interior looks very well kept and Grandmother doesn’t warn Sophia to be careful as she races into the place and heads excitedly for the top. She arrives there just in time to see the first lightning flash. There’s soon a tempest happening and her father is out at sea, on the boat that brought them to the island. The boat capsizes and he struggles in the water, it seems in danger of drowning. His mother and daughter await his return (though not, I thought, as anxiously as you’d expect). When he eventually appears, he hugs Sophia tight, still wearing his soaking wet clothes. It’s a wonder that, a screen minute or two later, he’s the only one with a cough and in need of medication. This is one of his mother’s concoctions of leaves and berries of the island. She explains their salutary properties to Sophia in more detail than either the child or The Summer Book‘s audience needs.
18 October 2024