Glenn Close anchors The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell’s patient study of island grief

Glenn Close anchors The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell’s patient study of island grief

A family withdraws to a bare island in the Gulf of Finland to do the one thing grief refuses to make simple: keep living. That is very nearly the whole event of The Summer Book, and Charlie McDowell stakes the film on it. There is no rescue, no reveal, no engine of plot, only a grandmother near the end of her life, a granddaughter racing toward the start of hers, and a father holding the middle together after his wife’s death.What makes the film…