Bee Season

Bee Season is a somber, and at times somnambulant, adaptation of a novel of the same title that I read a few years ago. The central part of the plot is a young girl competing in a series of spelling bees, but of course the theme is much more than that.

The main characters are the Naumann family. The father, played by Richard Gere, is a college professor who specializes in Jewish mysticism. At one point he explains to his students Tikkun Olam, the Hebrew phrase for "repairing the world," and this is the overriding arc of the film, as his family falls apart and they attempt to put the shards back together again. His wife, Juliette Binoche, suffers from kleptomania, and the son, Max Minghella, is tired of being under his father's watch and rebels by joining a Hare Krishna temple.

But the impetus of the story is when Eliza, played by Flora Cross, wins her school spelling bee. When her father finds out he becomes so enthusiastic that he coaches her by use of some of his Kabbala training, which leads her to visualize the words. This works much easier on the page, but the directors, David Siegel and Scott McGehee, do employ a variety of special effects to illustrate that cinematically, such as having the vines on Eliza's floral-print blouse come to life to spell out a word.

As Eliza progresses to the Nationals, her family situation gets worse, and Gere tries to keep everything together. Some of this is compelling, but only occasionally, as the film has a deadly earnestness that could give a viewer the fidgets. Cross, who is certainly a capable young actress, plays the part with very little outward emotion. When she is at the bees she has the look of an assassin. I'm sure this is how she was asked to play the part, but it's difficult to empathize with a kid who seems to be just one step up from comatose. Binoche seems to have been cast to utilize her fragile beauty (the character in the book was not French, as I recall) and you can tell she's a little out there from the very beginning. Gere is pretty good, but I must admit I inwardly chuckled when this well-known Buddhist has a confrontational scene at the Krishna temple.

For those who are interested in movies about spelling bees, I recommend the documentary Spellbound instead. That film actually had much more drama.