“Summer Hours” – Nathan’s Movie Challenge, Week 32
“l took something ordinary. What would l do with something valuable?”
This is a movie about art.
This is a movie about family.
This is a movie about deciding what’s important.
It’s also a movie about a house – a character unto itself.
It’s an extremely stripped-down experience of a matriarch pragmatically planning for her demise with her children while simultaneously deciding how best to ensure the legacy and creative output of the one she secretly loved.
It surprised me by how invested I was in the unglamorized story and the people involved. The characters got angry, but didn’t let anger overtake them. The characters were sad, but not melodramatically so. The clichés never materialized. It’s just a tiny slice-of-life and tone poem about how aesthetics, livelihood, and sentimentality are more important to being human than we think.
I dug it. Quite a bit.
Summer Hours was at the time of this review at #3988 on my Flickchart list of shame (ranked #5151 among the best films of all time). Here’s how it entered my chart:
Summer Hours vs. Tron: Legacy
I wish I wasn’t as disappointed in Tron: Legacy as I was. Great soundtrack, not much else. Summer Hours wins.
Summer Hours vs. Desperado
Desperado is really wonderful. It’s romantic. It’s violent. It’s stylish. Still holds up well. Winner!
Summer Hours vs. Spider-Man: Homecoming
As much as I liked the new Spidey, it probably won’t stick with me long. I imagine Summer Hours will.
Summer Hours vs. Enemy of the State
Will Smith is good. Gene Hackman is good. For the life of me, though, I can’t recall much of anything about the actual story. Not the best of signs.
Summer Hours vs. Perfect Blue
You can check out my assessment of Perfect Blue, but my conclusion for this matchup is I admire Summer Hours more.
Summer Hours vs. Spider-Man
Another Spider-Man! The first of the Raimi Spideys… If it was the second, it’d be no contest, but the first one is dated and not that exciting to go back to.
Summer Hours vs. 2012
2012: The guiltiest of pleasures. John Cusack leading the end of the world is my kind of movie. It’s better than you’d expect.
Summer Hours vs. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Not that hot on Wes Anderson as a whole. Summer Hours is better.
Summer Hours vs. Closer
Closer was well-acted, but felt artificial. Kind of like a stage-play. Not really so much of a film. Summer Hours is more interesting.
Summer Hours vs. Charade
Eh, Charade did a whole lot of nothing for me. I particularly dislike Cary Grant.
Summer Hours vs. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Close, but surprisingly I think I prefer the stark realism of Summer Hours to the zany fun of GotG 2. Who’d’a’thunk?
Summer Hours is now ranked #399 out of 1541 movies on my Best Movies of All-Time chart.
It’s now #9 on my Family Drama movies chart and my 10th favorite film from 2008.
Next up is Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Time After Time, and Thank You For Smoking. In the meantime, check out the other films I’ve ranked during the challenge.
I will now confess I fretted over recommending Summer Hours. It was an intimately personal film for me, and I vacillate between wanting everyone in the world to see it and keeping it to myself. As a movie matchmaker, I’m generally pretty conservative. I try to stick within what I know of someone’s taste, rather than taking it upon myself to challenge that person’s taste with something abrasive. I had no feel for how you felt about straight-down-the-middle dramas, or foreign language films in general, for that matter. I worried that it might be engaging enough to hold your interest.
Then I remembered that you’d once said in a conversation about what movie we’d all pick if we knew it would be the last one we’d ever see that ideally, you’d rather watch home movies of your family. That wasn’t in the scope of the conversation, but it did teach me a little more about you than I’d learned to that point. And I reasoned that even if Nathan the Movie-Watcher didn’t care for straight-down-the-middle dramas or foreign language films, Nathan the Family Man Who Appreciates Art would appreciate the film’s themes.
I’m glad you’ve now seen and enjoyed Summer Hours, and I’m also glad I got to be the one who introduced it to you. :)