Opening The Summer Book

Bringing to life the 1972 novel of the same name by Tove Jansson, The Summer Book reflects on the struggle of balancing grief with familial duty and learning to give other people in pain grace. Both book and film follow 6-year-old Sophia (Matthews), who visits her family’s summer house off the Gulf of Finland with her grandmother (Close) and father (Lie), not long after her mother’s passing. Robert Jones’ adaptation details an aimless summer spent by the three as they each go through their own silent battle – the daughter to learn patience, the father to learn to live past his grief, and the grandmother to guide them both in preparation for her own impending passing. For each of the characters, the escape to the remote island offers natural healing. The father and daughter reconcile in a storm in an almost baptismal way, while the grandmother breathes in the ocean air and moss like it’s an inhaler as her health exhausts.

Directing his fourth feature film, Charlie McDowell (The One I Love) draws a layered performance from young Matthews in her film debut. As the heart of the film, the sweet-faced Matthews lightens the drama with sassy, sometimes pitiful line readings, but she capably takes on more serious scenes as well, as when her character clasps her little hands below her chin and prays worriedly to reverse a previous prayer for a storm. The far more seasoned Close, an eight-time Oscar nominee (Fatal Attraction, The Wife), delivers a beautiful performance as the grandmother, too, her smiling eyes and wide lips suggesting a bemusement with her son and granddaughter as they stumble through the summer. Acting alongside Scandinavian performers, the American Close not only pulls off a Finnish accent here; she convinces you this woman has truly been crawling and diving around the island for half a century. And though the ladies steal the show, Lie (a Joachim Trier regular) is moving as the father despite his lesser screentime. Near the film’s end, his performance struggling around his boat in the rain and yelling out at the sky in frustration is enough to win over the audience.

That’s one of the more dramatic moments in a film that is mostly incredibly quiet and not especially plot-driven. Shot on 16mm and in natural lighting by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, The Summer Book is beautiful to look at, but is sometimes overwhelmed by the number of shots observing nature – time that might have been better spent on the characters interacting with the space, or with each other. Nature may be healing, but too many static shots of it can drag an already slow movie out even more. Still, it’s not enough to detract from the moving performances of its three leads, who make The Summer Book well worth the watch.

⭐⭐⭐

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