Review: 'Summerland' tells a tender story of love during wartime, but the director's timing is off

The wartime melodrama “Summerland” works better in theory than in practice, as first-time feature director Jessica Swale’s script suffers from a smarmy delivery.

It’s 1940, or thereabouts, and Alice (Gemma Arterton) lives alone in a small house in a seaside town near the white cliffs of Dover. She spends much of her time typing furiously on an old manual typewriter, or out doing research on the origins of folklore and mythology — particularly “floating islands,” the shoreline version of mirages, and the myths of Summerland, the pagan version of heaven.

One day, one of the town ladies — none of whom care much for Alice — arrives at her door, with a boy, Frank (Lucas Bond), an evacuee from London who’s been assigned to live with Alice. The solitary writer objects to the placement, but is coerced into caring for Frank for a week, at least, until other arrangements are made. Frank finds Alice to be gruff and unsmiling, though not the witch that his new school friend Edie (Dixie Egerickx) claims she is.

Alice, we learn, wasn’t always so dour. In flashbacks, we see a younger Alice meeting the free-spirited Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). A passionate romance ensues, quietly ignored by their Jazz Age contemporaries — until Vera’s desire to become a mother drives a wedge between them.

Swale, a playwright with whom Arterton worked on the West End production of her comedy “Nell Gwynn,” lays in all the right land mines in her script, timed to go off for maximum emotional impact. Then Swale loses the detonator, with choppy pacing and some rookie moves that telegraph the plot’s punchline long before it arrives.

It’s too bad, because the raw materials are there for a loving, if overly nostalgic, look at a small piece of the English home front and the community effort to protect London’s children. There are moments when Swale seems about to deliver a heartfelt, emotionally charged drama — but, like the mirages Alice chases along the coast, the moments evaporate into thin air.

——

‘Summerland’

★★

Available starting Friday, July 31, as a video-on-demand on various streaming platforms, and at most Megaplex Theaters locations. Rated PG for thematic content, some suggestive comments, language, and smoking. Running time: 99 minutes.