A few days after the world premiere of Griffin in Summer at the Tribeca Film Festival 2024, I’ve come across people calling 14 year old Griffin Naifly (Everett blunck) words such as “sociopath” or “annoying.” Maybe they’re right: that’s the case with the annoying one for sure. But isn’t being annoying, at least sometimes, a teenage thing, which is characteristic of almost all teenagers?
That is one thing that Nicholas Celia, who was the writer and director of Griffin in Summer, gets right in his feature directorial debut which is a coming of age comedy that focuses on a particular type of character and how his summer changes his world forever. It is clear, from the stage where Griffin is performing a school talent show, his talent does not belong to kids of his age. While most children of his age are exuberant singing off key to oldies songs Griffin Naifly, a kid on stage likes to call himself a playwright. Instead of making a fool of himself and singing off key to an oldies hit, Griffin performs all the roles in a scene from his own play Regrets of Autumn which is about adult divorce and he depicts as a blend of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with American Beauty.
Every summer comes with certain activities which Griffin and his friends look forward to; they usually come together to direct one of his plays. This year, however, some of their enthusiasm seems to have been lost as most are more interested in drinking hard seltzer and camping than doing anything productive. Even Griffin’s best friend Kara, who is sweet enough to stay warm hearted towards her friends, prefers going out with her new boyfriend (the terrific Abby Ryder Fortson from last year’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, although in all honesty rather underused here). Griffin who on the other hand is rather standoffish and is always dressed in collared shirts, looking like he only uses emails to express himself does not hold back in his increasing temper tantrums directed towards his friends. But his situation begins to change when his mom (Melanie Lynskey) gets herself a cute young handyman called Brad (Owen Teague) to look after their pool while she attends to some work and his father is out of town. What is more interesting is that it turns out that Brad is a New York performance artist who is down on his luck and when he takes even the slightest notice of Regrets of Autumn, it infuriates Griffin who eagerly takes the chance to put him in the spotlight while pushing aside some personal issues.
Griffin in Summer’s storyline, particularly Griffin’s intimate regard for Brad which is derived from Griffin’s sexuality cannot be described as a queer coming out or coming of age transformation. The more distant Brad comes moving to new York, being out with his horrible girlfriend (a caricature played by Kathryn Newton but very funny), the more he really is a grown up man the further he tries to go get him. Is Griffin a bit with a loose screw if one could put it like that? Yes. But it is the combination of Block’s twitches and shouts in the scene mixed with complete uncertainty at the end of it that, combined with Celia’s words, help to understand why this particular type of love, the first one, so strong you feel you’ll collapse if you don’t hang on to it, is like being run over by a truck. Teague is also good in that he can afford the role. He seems to have this really stupid and senseless lazy bum’s approach to life which completely explains why for someone like Griffin it is attractive.
But there are other events as well i.e. Griffin parents’ divorce which serve a different purpose in the story such as the annoying feeling of seeing his friends growing up and leaving him behind. In turns distracting from the absurdity of his work where children act like grown girls pretending to drink martini, scream about walking out of their husbands and getting abortions at such tender ages, and abuse liberalism.
What is new about Summer’s storytelling or Griffin’s character is not that there is one thing worthy of such a description but that there is a flow to the narrative. And it is not merely the style or the witty dialogues that made it possible to depict the process of growth and change, but there was also a constructive motivation and such is truly a good and capable depiction of an outcast finding his or her own place within the community and not compromising his or her principles and dreams.
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