I'm blown away. In a world where the IQ targets of movies have been declining for nearly four decades, where the iconic Coming of Age story has descended from the wit of The Graduate to the banality of Friends, where Whale Rider has seemed the best since Flirting because Hollywood keeps lowering the bar, I have just seen a wonderful film called Summer.
Summer, from Canada, appears to have been shot for such a small budget that it puts to final rest the adage `You get what you pay for.' True, you can plainly see how little was paid in cheap filming medium and a few editing gaps, and the filming locations are appalling in their ordinariness (isn't most of the inhabited world?), but this film is outstanding for two reasons. First, the story: Coming of Age, AKA Who Am I and How Can I Become Who I Really Am?, the all-time Third Best Plot (the Best Plot being Love is Everything, the Second Best being Goodness Will Win). For a first film on a subject that's been done so often, it manages to be funny, touching, really insightful and very much worth watching. And second, the acting is extraordinary.
This movie is about three kids, no four kids, no six, no. it's about all kids, actually. At least the ones who graduate from (whatever) and find themselves facing The Cold, Cruel, Scary World. Charlie (Michael Rubenfeld) has succeeded due to his belief in boldness. Stefanie (Karen Cliché) worries that her chosen profession (acting) is not one where one meets lots of good people. Miller, (Joe Cobden) is lost, so unsure of his path that he just wants to play for a summer or maybe longer.. And, Ella (Amy Sloan), Miller's girlfriend, faces The Cold, Cruel, Scary World by attacking it before it attacks her. They beautifully illustrate ways that young people face their second toughest decision (the first being Who Will I Marry and third being Where Will I Live? both of which get some play in this movie as well).
The time is the Last Summer Before It Starts. They hold court at a swimming pool the size of a small world that is their turf until it is taken over by a `pool Nazi.' (The rendition was so cartoonish that this character didn't belong in this film). They drink to excess (none of them smoke, which I found really refreshing; no tobacco industry product placements here). They make new friends, couple and uncouple, listen to the best recorded music in recent films for young people and face crises in ways that determine their trajectories. This isn't a film that will appeal to those who thrive on car chases, explosions and computer-animated fantastic martial arts feats. The kids aren't crude or inexplicably mindless; everything they do and say reveals their conflicted intelligence and appeal.
Miller is the emotional center of the film, a kid who is facing the choice of working in an antiquarian bookstore or going to another city to do something big and bold in business. Ella, played by an actress so attractive and fresh it's hard to believe that she hasn't been sucked into the Hollywood black hole yet, wants to be a physician and feels the need to start working towards it Right Now, even if that jeopardizes her relationship with Miller. As a result, Miller feels driven into the orbit of a woman who sends red flags up in everyone but him. His apology is one of the most nakedly touching I have ever seen on film. Yet it is topped by another-delivered by someone who was was, to that point, the film's least interesting character-who also makes a bad choice of the heart, and takes the stage and humbles herself before friends and strangers alike in a monologue of almost Shakespearian power even if its subject and delivery are 100% today.
In the end we are left feeling that we have become friends with some remarkable young people, and are the richer for it. What more can you ask from a movie, especially a first feature film shot for so little money, the kind that screens in very non-prime hours on small audience-share TV stations? A movie that isn't available on DVD? But however overlooked, Summer is a gem, clearly a 10, one I dearly wish there were a way to share with my wife and my three twentysomething sons.
