About the time 6-year-old Sophia of “The Summer Book” offers a prayer to quell her ennui — “let something happen, like a storm or anything, Amen” — a viewer might be wishing for a similar respite from the drama’s subdued goings on. That may sound dismissive; it’s not.
The director Charlie McDowell’s delicate adaptation — written by Robert Jones and starring Glenn Close — of the Finnish author Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel about Sophia (Emily Matthews), her father (Anders Danielsen Lie) and her grandmother’s summer on a small Finnish island is a ruminative affair.
Before shifting to the long-sun-lighted season of the title, the movie opens on an icy shore, a shuttered cabin nearby. Soon we glean that a different winter is edging toward Grandmother (Close). Authentically affecting, Close signals its approach. Her gaze is as inward as it is faraway. Grandmother listens for it in the island’s bounty of sounds and silences.
Life and its companion, mortality, permeate this drama. Matthews’s Sophia is inquisitive but also exhibits the muted fearfulness of child who has recently lost a parent. The role of Father doesn’t give the wonderful Norwegian actor Lie quite enough to do beyond hunker into his own achy grief.
Even so, the movie is not bound to expositions on the mother’s absence. Instead, it’s centered on Sophia and her grandmother. Scanning the elder woman’s weathered visage and the grandchild’s open face as well as giving the island’s rocky, forested, mossy and watery environs their many close-ups, “The Summer Book” offers a loving portrait of budding and fading.
The Summer Book
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
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