Glenn Close brings her totemic presence to this gentle movie – as well as a makeup-enhanced grandmotherly face. This is a sweet-natured adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel; it has charm, though it’s sometimes becalmed in its own sensitivity.
Close plays a tough, wise, humorous-yet-cantankerous eightysomething woman who likes cigarettes and walking around outside stark naked when there’s nobody else around. She brings her recently widowed son (Anders Danielsen Lie) and six-year-old granddaughter Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews) to a tiny, idyllic island in the Gulf of Finland, where they have a summer cottage. The grandmother may, incidentally, have unresolved feelings for local man Eriksson, in a fleeting cameo for veteran Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson.
It is here that grandmother, son and granddaughter hope to work through their grief and somehow find a version of the happiness that they once had there as a family, and come to terms with what happened to Sophia’s mum (though we do not discover how she died). Close’s formidable and very watchable performance shows us how the grandmother is unsentimentally taking on the burden of simply being there for Sophia – chatting to her about this and that, while her son retreats into his own sadness and what she robustly calls his self-pity. In fact, the film does not give us much idea of what he is thinking and feeling, perhaps wasting the considerable acting talents of Danielsen Lie.
We are, of course, approaching a moment of catharsis when they can all say the painful, angry, grief-filled things in their hearts; this arrives with a storm that endangers their boat trip to the nearby Söderskär lighthouse. It is an unwritten movie rule that lovable old people who are paired with the very young have to die before the closing credits, their work of imparting wisdom complete. But in a film like this, which is already about death, it isn’t clear if the rule applies; consequently, there is a kind of generic uncertainty about the grandmother’s fate which is maintained until the very end. Without Close, this may have been a little insipid; with her, it is affecting and distinctive.
• The Summer Book is in UK cinemas from 7 August.
