The Summer Book

The Summer Book is a haiku of a movie, conveying profound thoughts about time, memory, loss, and nature through a simplified, meditative, cinematic language of exquisite images and gentle music.

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 cumulative experience is affecting in its own minor-key way, an appealing throwback to old-fashioned family dramas of a more innocent era.

The film just lacks in, you know, tension, danger, build, and stakes, the hallmarks of dramatic narrative. It’s almost as though the word “mellifluous,” pertaining to Hania Rani’s score, was coined for this film.

Charlie McDowell makes an equally respectful and respectable stab at the task, capturing some of the wistful, soft-sun warmth of Jansson’s writing — though not quite matching its unassuming poetic depths.

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).

The earnestness slowly becomes suffocating, and Grandmother’s endless lessons grating. Yes, nature is the ultimate healer. And?