Summering Is a Real Bummer

S ummering, directed and co-written by James Ponsoldt (The End of the Tour, The Spectacular Now), doesn’t work as a regular movie, the sort with characters and plot and narrative movement. Things happen, and there’s a story, but Ponsoldt seems almost wholly uninterested in the events on-screen. What he seems to be after is what those events signify. His theme is childhood’s end, and as long as what he’s showing illustrates some aspect of that, then it’s all good, whether or not it makes any sense in terms of what’s actually going on. At one point, the four girls whose sad duty it is to embody this theme walk past a grade-school display: a brown paper tree bearing leaves made from painted-hand prints. After they leave the shot, the hand prints magically peel away and drift to the floor like autumn leaves. (It’s the end of summer, you see, the end of that time when, as the opening narration tells us, “everything is alive and anything is possible.” Rather like childhood.) My first reaction was, “What? Why? How?” My second was to recall the scene from David Mamet’s State and Main wherein a director demands a physically impossible shot from his cinematographer, saying only, “No, you can’t lose that shot. The meaning of the film is in that shot.” In State and Main, it was funny. Here, it turns a movie into a visual tone poem.

That’s the generous take. The less-generous take is that Ponsoldt simply didn’t care if things made narrative sense or not. In one scene, our girls recoil in fear when they hear a knock at a darkened house’s front door, only to have the person who enters the house say he didn’t think anyone would be home. Um, then why knock? Why, so the girls can recoil in fear, of course!

Even as a tone poem, though, it’s rough going. Most of the time, that tone is melancholy bordering on elegiac. It’s the last weekend of summer, the last weekend before middle school and a parting of the ways between smart Dina, mystical Lola, sad Daisy, and Catholic Mari, who begs Mom to let her skip Mass so that she can be with her friends before heading off to private school. But here and there, it veers sharply and suddenly into goofy slapstick — a bad-sitcom gag involving a busted cellphone, or a strangely shaggy joke in which a barfly keeps suggesting the name “Bob” for a mystery character. And there and here, it shoots for nightmarish horror, as the girls are treated to visions of a dead man stalking. Why? I guess because the end of childhood can feel absurd sometimes, and scary at other times. But the effect is often jarring enough to leave the viewer wondering, What exactly am I watching here?

About that dead man, and the story that Summering seems so eager to neglect: The girls begin their weekend with a Friday-afternoon trip to Terabithia. That’s their name (borrowed from a children’s book) for a scraggly tree in a ravine that they have decorated with all manner of childhood knickknacks, including a photo-strip of themselves in younger, happier days. “All hail, Terabithia,” they say upon arrival, bowing down before this shrine to vanishing youth that is named after an imaginary world. I want to sympathize. When my oldest daughter was a teenager, she used to say that she wished she could be ten again. But these kids are acting nostalgic for days gone by before they’ve even gone by.

The ritual is interrupted when sad Daisy — her dad vanished a while back, and now she’s wondering if her friends will vanish, too — discovers a dead body nearby. It seems that Terabithia is not far from Suicide Bridge, so named because of all the people who jumped from it during the Great Depression. Marveling that something so dark could be so near and yet so unrecognized, one of the girls comments, “There’s probably a lot of things that we don’t know.” There are many lines like this, lest the viewer miss the point.

Well, now: a dead body. Four childhood friends. Is this going to be a gender-swapped Stand By Me? No. It’s going to be a kiddie CSI, as the girls decide to spend the weekend investigating the situation. Why? Well, they don’t want their moms getting all upset and asking a million questions. But really, because: “This is on us. Our body.” Well, okay then. He doesn’t have a wallet — that would make things too easy — but there’s a matchbook in his shoe (!) from a local bar, and the game is afoot.

Ponsoldt works hard to make room for genuine adventure in an age of cellphones and helicopter parenting, and he works even harder at getting the banter between his preadolescent characters. And during their initial, idyllic, pastoral, color-drenched journey to Terabithia, I thought he might manage it. Mari laments that she’ll have to wear a skirt every day for school, and tries out the word “patriarchal” as part of her complaint, only to have Daisy meekly counter that it’d be a relief to not have to worry about what to wear. They talk about what names they’d give themselves if they could: One is proud of the name she already has, another wants a name that signifies cool, “like Taylor Swift, or Beyoncé.” I could even stand the on-the-nose musing on how steps forward take you forward in time, but what if steps backward could take you back? I thought, Maybe this will be what makes the movie work. Maybe girls of a certain age will love it, not for the story, but for the feeling captured in this dialogue. Maybe it’s okay that everything matters only so far as it signifies, because the events of your life seem so significant at that age.

But the ensuing events drove those thoughts from my mind, and by the time I heard lines like “In case you haven’t noticed, growing up isn’t great,” “I guess some things die to leave room for new things,” and “I don’t want us to end,” I found myself concluding, Children are precious. But they should never be this precious.