James Ponsoldt is having the kind of career that future students of the business of film may study with some confusion. He made his name by turning out three indie dramas in four years – “Smashed,” “The Spectacular Now,” and “The End of the Tour” – all well-received, all running the Sundance-premiere-to-boutique-distributor pipeline. But he fumbled on the next step, an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ “The Circle” starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, and he’s spent the past five years directing for television. His latest film, “Summering,” feels like a conscious attempt to go back to his roots: a small-scale character-driven drama, debuting at the ‘dance. But there’s just not much movie there.
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The film opens amusingly, with four tween friends (Dina, Lola, Daisy, and Mari) in a game of hide-and-seek that’s shot and scored like a set piece in a suspense picture – underlining that at this age, “play” doesn’t feel like play, and your imagination can make the stakes of even silly time-killers feel high. They take off, running and giggling and somersaulting through the sprinklers, careening into the last weekend of the summer before middle school. Ponsoldt nicely captures the feel of having nowhere to go with your friends, with nothing to do but take long, wandering walks, chatting and imagining your future.
“Let’s go back two months,” one proposes. “Then we can have summer all over again.” Instead, they find themselves tasked with a darker objective: While wandering the woods, they find a dead man in a suit lying on the ground, apparently a recent death, probably a jumper from a nearby bridge. The logical next step would be to call the cops, but they shrug that off. (“You know our moms, they’ll think we’re like…traumatized. First, the cops will ask us a million questions. Then the moms will ask us a million questions.”) So they make a pact to try to figure out, on their own, who this guy was and what could have led him to his untimely end.
It sounds like an odd reaction, but hey, at least it’s something to do during their last weekend before middle school. Thus, the young friends begin their own investigation, taking the man’s photo (“Use a filter, so he won’t look quite so dead”) and poking around their small town for information. In the process, of course, they end up learning less about him, and more about themselves, etc.
None of Podsoldt’s previous features were exactly feats of stylish filmmaking, but this one is strangely amateurish in execution; it looks, oddly, more like a first film than Ponsoldt’s actual first film, filled with jarring cross-fades and other oft-abused iMovie tricks. The look is serviceable enough but entirely free of personality, and the script, by Benjamin Percy, is a strange mishmash of tones and ideas. The supernatural elements feel especially arbitrary, as if the filmmakers realized they need to juice up their pretty standard coming-of-age story with some genre elements to make the movie feel a little more substantial (or perhaps more commercial).
The young actors – Lia Barnett, Madalen Mills, Eden Grace Redfield, and Sanai Victoria – are all charismatic and engaging, particularly in the scenes they share with the actors who play their mothers. Redfield and Megan Mullally are particularly good; they have an easy byplay and comic rhythm that gives us an immediate sense of their relationship. A later scene of Mullally desperately trying to get in touch with her daughter is written and played with such delicate grace that it nearly derails the picture, in that I wanted to spend more time with her. Barnett’s Daisy carves out a very different relationship with her alcoholic cop mother (Lake Bell), who’s barely keeping it together, with considerable help from her daughter. We see immediately that the roles have reversed – that the young girl is now her mother’s caretaker and is feeling the weight of that responsibility. Sarah Cooper and Ashley Madekwe find similar nuance with their on-screen daughters, helping create an admirable variety of relationships among the central quartet. In the film and in life, no two parent-child relationships are exactly alike.
All in all, “Summering” is a very nice movie – sweet, affectionate, nostalgic, harmless – so it’s tempting to give it a pass. But “nice” and “compelling,” sadly, are not the same thing. [C]
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