Butler's Cinema Scene

Gemma Arterton, Lucas Bond

“SUMMERLAND” My rating: B

99 minutes | MPAA rating:PG

One of literature’s more enduring themes — that of a misanthrope redeemed by the love of a child (Silas Marner, anyone?) — gets a clever reworking in Jessica Swale’s “Summerland.”

In her quaint cottage on the Dover seashore, Alice (Gemma Arterton) has pretty much managed to avoid the  unpleasantries of the world war taking place on the other side of the channel. A middle-aged recluse regarded by the local kids as some sort of witch (they stuff dirt and sticks into her mail slot), Alice immerses herself in her scholarly study of British folklore. She just wants to be left alone.

So she’s more than a little miffed when told that like many other residents of this rural area, she is expected to take in a child evacuated from London and its nightly air raids. Frank (Lucas Bond) is already traumatized at being separated from his soldier father and government-worker mother; things aren’t improved when Alice gives him a chilly reception and immediately launches an effort with the local schoolmaster (the venerable Tom Courtenay) to have the youngster reassigned to another home.

Swale’s screenplay follows one familiar trajectory, but manages to change things up with a couple of novel twists.

The cranky woman and the innocent child eventually will warm to one another.  This goes without saying.

Frank’s relationship with a another displaced child (Dixie Egerickx) feels fairly predictable as well.

But in a series of flashbacks we see young Alice  having an affair — her only sexual encounter, apparently — with a fellow university student, Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Their idyllic flapper-era romance ends when Vera opts for conventional marriage and children over a mixed-race lesbian relationship (which, in  late 1920s Britain, was a far dicier premise than it is today).

This soul-shattering disappointment explains Alice’s intervening years of surly solitude. Having been badly burned, she’s not keen on forming relationships of any depth.  Which makes the presence of curly-haired Frank all the more problematic.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Gemma Arterton

Initially the considerable screen time devoted to the Alice/Vera romance is puzzling.  Not to worry…Swale has a nifty gotcha up her sleeve, and in the end all the pieces fall neatly into place.

Former Bond Girl Arterton (“Quantum of Solace”) ditches any semblance of glamour to present Alice as a no-nonsense pragmatist, all freckles, unkempt hair and unflattering dungarees. Watching her brittle facade slowly melt as she comes to appreciate and lover her young houseguest is quite wonderful.

Young Master Bond is one of those blessed child actors who never appear to be acting.

One of the film’s quiet pleasures is its depiction of small-town Britain and Alice’s trips into the countryside (now accompanied by Frank) to research local mythology.  She’s particularly obsessed with legends about a castle floating in the sky over the White Cliffs; it’s young Frank who discovers the source of this phenomenon.

In its  attempt to frame a modern story within a latticework of Celtic fables, “Summerland” sometimes reaches too far for comfort. But if the mythological underpinnings work only intermittently, at least they do work.

So we get human relationships unfolding against a background of ancient magic.  Not bad.

| Robert W. Butler