Film review

  • The Summer Book

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Nightbitch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marielle Heller (2024)

    In Nightbitch, adapted by Marielle Heller from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name, a frustrated American wife and mother, played by Amy Adams, starts turning – or thinks she’s turning – into a dog.  Adams gives a fine performance and the movie is entertaining but Heller lacks either the film-making imagination or the nerve, perhaps both, to make it sing as a horror-comedy.  Adams’s character, Mother, is otherwise nameless; the same goes for Husband (Scoot McNairy) and the couple’s toddler, Son.  (This is less irritating in the film than it looks on paper:  the woman, man and child don’t, of course, address each other by their cast names.)  The action is set in a small town somewhere in the Midwest.  Until Son was born, Mother, a fine arts graduate, was a moderately successful artist and worked in a local gallery.   Now she’s confined to the house except when she takes Son to the supermarket or the playground or a library-playgroup sing-along.  She feels all the more isolated because Husband works out of town Monday to Friday, returning home just at weekends.  The first sign of Mother’s unusual condition arrives when Son comments on her ‘fuzzy’ back.  Then she notices unexpected facial hair.  Sitting in a park with Son, she’s surprised when dogs off the lead gather round, sniffing her enthusiastically.  It’s not long before Mother has grown six extra nipples.

    In the early scenes, there’s a clear distinction between reality and Mother’s imagining.  She bumps into Sally (Adrienne Rose White), who took over her gallery job and asks how she’s enjoying motherhood; in reply, Mother lists with increasing passion the reasons she resents it; Marielle Heller then cuts back to the real world, in which Mother tells Sally she’s utterly happy in her stay-at-home, nurturing role.  When Husband says he envies the time she gets to spend with Son, Mother actually does voice frustration.  Husband tells her she needs more structure in her life and that ‘happiness is a choice’.  She slaps his face.  Except that she really doesn’t but reverts to acquiescence.  These bits, although obvious, are quite funny.  The same goes for Heller’s illustrations of Husband’s domestic incompetence.  When, for example, he offers to give Son his bath, Mother gratefully accepts; the next minute, Husband is asking where the towels are kept.  Heller seems comfortable for as long as she’s working at this mild level of feminist comedy but although each of her three previous features – The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) – involved a significant element of fantasy or pretence, the magic realist aspect of Nightbitch defeats her.

    There are occasional effective bits.  Mother takes Son to an eatery; when the crappy cutlery snaps as soon as she tries to use it, she gobbles her food, dog-like, straight from the plate – partly as a joke to entertain Son, mostly because it’s what comes naturally to her now.  She takes to nocturnal solo outings (which seems more cat-like than dog-like but never mind).  When she returns home covered in mud and takes a shower, Husband exclaims how dirty she is but is turned on by it and joins her in the shower.  But the narrative, which makes the same few points repeatedly, needs more in the way of incident and a more ambitious visual style.  I can’t honestly say I would have had more fun watching if the film had been more gross:  I’m so squeamish that I flinched even when Son, after doing a poo, hands it to Mother (who’s not so doggy that she’s happy to receive it, by the way).  Nightbitch should be more off the wall, though.  I don’t know how Rachel Yoder’s novel works (and am not going to find out) but I’m guessing it’s narrated by Mother in the first person.  The film might be better if it seemed to be happening entirely inside the protagonist’s head but it doesn’t, even though Mother is in nearly every scene.

    Although it’s made clear that Mother isn’t a young mother, Amy Adams sometimes looks a bit too mature, having put on weight to play the role (Mother does a fair amount of comfort eating).  Adams is physically fearless in it, though, and not just in the canine department.  Mother decides to have a paint day with Son to give her, as well as him, a bit of creative stimulation.  It soon gets messy and culminates in Mother’s slipping in the paint and landing flat on her back:  if this is trick photography rather than the star actually doing the pratfall, it’s trick photography of a high order.  Scoot McNairy partners Adams very well.  He expertly conveys Husband’s needy selfishness and comes over as a bit of an animal himself, probably a weasel.  Son is played by Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, presumably identical twins and amazingly good, given their very young age.

    The real (or CGI) dogs, though, are a disappointment – ditto the film’s climax and finale.  Mother and Husband split up; she resumes making art and soon has a successful exhibition; her life as a dog is over.  Husband comes along to the exhibition, apologising for how he treated her previously and failed to encourage her as an artist.  They reconcile.  Nightbitch ends with Mother giving birth again, Husband at her side: we’re supposed to assume she knows what she’s potentially in for, and won’t let it happen a second time.  This seems facile:  it would be truer to the satirical spirit of the film’s first half if Husband was, out of self-interest, cunningly pretending to have learned his lesson but there’s no suggestion of that.  There’s a concluding voiceover from Mother about motherhood being brutal and primal and exhausting.  The speech is faintly reminiscent of the America Ferrera character’s number in Barbie until Mother turns suddenly upbeat, extolling Mothers (the upper case seems right in this instance) as gods and creators, too.  When we last see the dogs, they’re in the background, keeping a respectful distance now that Mother has got cynanthropy out of her system.  In fact these animals have been too well behaved throughout.  Nightbitch may sound wild.  In Marielle Heller’s hands, it’s domesticated.

    17 October 2024

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