Movie Review: ‘Summering’ Falls Flat

Summering, 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!

ML

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Matthew Lickona

Matthew Lickona is a writer and editor living in Southern California. From 2010 to 2019, he was a film critic for the San Diego Reader.

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Summering, 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!