At one point in The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell’s infinitely gentle adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel about a small girl, her father and grandmother spending the short Finnish summer on one of the country’s thousands of islands, nine-year-old Sophia looks at a tapestry on the wall showing a rampant lion. “Is the lion going to eat the man in the tent?,” she asks her redoubtable grandmother, played by a suitably sun-gnarled Glenn Close. “No,” Grandmother says firmly, “He is there to protect him.”
The embrace of nature, even when nature presents as a ferocious storm or the cruel predations of old age, is the guiding spirit of both Jansson’s novel, published in 1972 and drawing on her own long summers spent with a niece, and this faithfully rendered adaptation. Jansson spent much of her life living in a cottage like this one – all wooden planks and questionable plumbing – where, in the film, Sophia, her father (Anders Danielsen Lie, quietly rewarding as ever) and Grandma arrive on a motorboat in the first scene.
It is immediately clear that Sophia’s mother has died since they were last here. Sophia’s father, an illustrator, strains to be the fun dad one senses he used to be, taking refuge from that role in his work. Sophia, played with precocious subtlety by newcomer Emily Matthews as alert and inquisitive, but struggling with her own complicated grief, demands constant attention from Grandmother. Sometimes she groans that she is bored. There are no iPads here, but her boredom blows away – as it did, pre-iPad – soon enough.
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For those of us raised on Tove Jansson’s gorgeous Moomin books – an ongoing saga about a family of amiably eccentric trolls — everything connected with her is entirely without fault. Those who are unfamiliar with her, or with the taciturn stoicism of the Finns, may wonder at the point of a film where every significant event in the story has already happened before it starts and emotions are conveyed by no more than the occasional raised eyebrow or longueur.
And it’s true: the story is no more than a few wisps — the dramatic equivalent of being tickled with a blade of grass, set among pine forests and pebble beaches and big skies that, while they are never exploited as spectacle, have as much to say to us as the characters do. So be it. For we devotees, it is a relief – and good reason for gratitude to scriptwriter Robert Jones — not to have been betrayed.
Of course, there is the awkwardness of telling a Finnish story in English with accents, which makes no logical sense. Norwegian actor Danielsen Lie is presumably putting a kind of twang on his normal speaking voice. Close mostly keeps a lid on an accent that does have something of the Swedish Chef around the edges, but she has a kind of theatricality to her creaking movements that sometimes registers as clunkily over-emphatic, punching through the gossamer of the storytelling.
There is fun to be had, though, when that firmness is brought to bear on things that offend her sense of island etiquette. Newcomers have built a house on a nearby island that now has a “Trespassers will be prosecuted” sign next to their jetty. From Grandmother’s point of view, what is that but flagrant rudeness, deserving to be defied? The house is just as offensive, with a new-fangled deck with couches where a proper bench and a stoop should be. She is not the slightest bit discombobulated when the owners arrive in their little boat, discover the trespassers and offer them coffee and cake. “This is socializing!,” she tells the confused Sophia, not especially sotto voce. “You have to learn how to do it.”
Close’s best moments come, however, when her character confronts the searing grief that is otherwise present only in silences. A local boatman, known only as Eriksson, who usually visits on Midsummer Night, is conspicuous by his absence. “Frightened off by the stench of grief,” says the father morosely. “Or self-pity!” says Grandmother, with the full force of Close’s status as a grande dame. “I’m trying,” he mumbles. “Not hard enough!” she replies, blunt as ever. “I won’t be here forever!”
Indeed, there is a strong sense that she – the character, Glenn Close, the ghosts of all the women in the Jansson family; take your pick – will choose the time of her final departure and my goodness, there will be no arguing with it.
And healing does abide with this little family, without anyone having to address it any further, without emotional confrontations, without anything but time and weather. And The Summer Book, which Sophia’s father is constructing all the while, drawing at his desk overlooking the silvery sea when his daughter goes to bed, is a show of love without words. Very much like this film, in fact.
Title: The Summer Book
Festival: London Film Festival (Special Presentations)
Director: Charlie McDowell
Screenwriter: Robert Jones
Cast: Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie, Emily Matthews
Sales: Charades
Running time: 1 hr 30 mins
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