In Charlie McDowell’s last feature, Windfall, the ambitious (though largely unsuccessful) idea was to put the audience in a stressful situation (à la Hitchcock) and then quickly vent the pressure with a few violent set pieces (à la Tarantino). By contrast, his latest feature, The Summer Book, is based entirely on what we might call “scenic exhalation”: those moments of repose in which a character stares at a landscape while the cogs of reflection work away, revealing at last the bittersweet unity of all things. When used sparingly, the exhalation can be a highly effective tool capable of immense lyricism (as in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice) and of subtle characterization (as in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island). When used excessively, however, as it is in The Summer Book, the world of the movie starts to look suspiciously neat and Edenic, and the director’s benevolent hand becomes visible for all to see.
As you might have gathered from the above examples, the exhalation crops up disproportionately in films set in northern Scandinavia, where the landscapes are relatively untouched and thus ripe for writers to smuggle into their collage of earth, air, fire, and water that dubious fifth element: soul. And the same is true of The Summer Book, which uses for its emotional terrain the desolate Gulf of Finland. There we follow eight-year-old Sophia, her father (credited only as “Father”), and her grandmother (similarly “Grandmother”), as they try to come to terms with the death of Sophia’s mother, who is mentioned only briefly but whose absence is felt throughout the film.
McDowell wastes no time in establishing the film’s main formula: the different aspects of the landscape equal the different emotional states of the characters. Sophia’s grandmother, who views the current situation and her own looming death in a broad, cycle-of-life sort of way, is frequently associated with the sea and the sky, the stillness of dawn, and the ambience of sunlight breaking through the trees (one scene in particular, in which she wanders through a forest, seems to be reaching for the final moments of Tarkovsky’s Mirror). And Sophia and her father are similarly drawn: she by a mixture of forest furrows and rocky precipices; he by a blankness of gray skies and, towards the end of the film, by a sudden storm that threatens to sink his boat and at which he bellows, as all harried sailors in films must, “Is that all you’ve got?”
And for much of the film we are left asking the same question. For though Sophia and her grandmother are given space to develop slowly, if conventionally, Sophia’s father doesn’t really get much of a look-in. Until his eye-rolling storm scene, which proves to be the catalyst for a hurried back-from-the-brink arc, he is used only as gloomy background fodder and as the unlucky executor of McDowell’s clunkiest visual metaphors, foremost among them being a protracted shot in which the arrow of a weathervane appears to pierce his chest. The consequence of this underwritten and then suddenly hugely overwritten part is a kind of narrative whiplash, an unintended jerkiness of mood and behavior as the plot catapults to its predictable end. Which is a shame, because Anders Danielsen Lie has proved himself to be a fine actor when given good material, and might well have complemented Emily Matthews’ solid performance as the brave but vulnerable Sophia and perhaps reined in Glenn Close’s mischievous granny, whose monologues and cane-wielding frequently verge on actorly indulgence.
Nevertheless, it is the more playful interactions between Sophia and her grandmother that provide The Summer Book’s best moments, such as an excursion to a private island that is played like a little action set piece, and a brief moment in which the solitude of Sophia’s grandmother’s meditation is broken by the sound of Sophia trundling down some creaky stairs. But despite the fleeting charm of these exchanges, in which each character takes emotional refuge in the other, The Summer Book as a whole proves much too programmatic (an early don’t-worry-it’s-nothing cough sets the tone) and much too fearful of leaving its audience in the dark about the characters’ emotional states (hence its symbolic clutter). In the end, McDowell falls into that trap which the gloomy Swede was so careful to avoid: of telling us so much about the characters that we hardly know them at all.
The Summer Book premiered at the BFI London Film Festival.