Movie Review |
Dry Spell: Bee Seasonby M. Faust |
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Bee Season stars Richard Gere as a Jewish theologian who uses his study of Kabbalah to help his 9-year-old daughter become a national spelling champion.
You may want to re-read that sentence a few times. Go ahead, take your time; I’ll wait.
Ready? OK. If that sentence made any sense at all to you, it can only be because you’ve read the novel by Myla Goldberg on which it was based. (I’m told that it was a “best seller,” a phrase which doesn’t mean what it once did, but that’s a gripe for another day.)
Like The Squid and the Whale, which also opens this week, Bee Season is the story of a family led by two parents who seem to be passing nothing on to their children but their own emotional failings. Outwardly the Naumanns are an ideal family. Father Saul (Gere) is a professor of religion at Berkeley. Mother Miriam (Juliette Binoche) does something that involves putting on a lab coat and peering into microscopes. Oldest child Aaron (Max Minghella, son of Anthony) prepares for his bar mitzvah and studies the cello, playing Bach duets with dad on violin.
Only 9-year-old daughter Eliza (Flora Cross) seems without direction (which seems to me a lot less scary than a 9-year-old on a career path). Unknown to her family, she has been entering local spelling bees and winning. But when Saul finds out, he is delighted.
He’s especially intrigued when Eliza tells him that she doesn’t do much in the way of studying and memorizing: she simply closes her eyes and the words reveal themself to her (and to us via the magic of special effects). Saul feels that she is in tune with his studies of Kabbalah, the ancient practice of Jewish mysticism. In particular, he believes she is touched with the kabbalistic notion that letters of the alphabet have an inherent magical power that can reveal the voice of God.
The bylaws of the national spelling bee championship apparently having no restriction against getting direct help from God, Eliza is soon on her way to Washington, DC to compete at the highest level. Saul becomes so focused on his daughter that he fails to notice the rest of his family falling apart. Aaron sets out on a search for his own religious revelation, eventually chosing the path most likely to exasperate his father. And Miriam embarks on a most peculiar path toward her understanding of Saul’s teaching of “Tikkun Olam”—to repair a shattered world.
I’m vague about what Miriam is up to less from a desire not to give away too much of the story as from utter incomprehension, a reaction I experienced more than once while watching Bee Season. (The first was while trying to figure out why any marketing executive would let a film go out into the world with such a title.) Giving the movie the benefit of the doubt, consider it an attempt to dramatize a range of concerns that are more comfortably tackled in novels. That would make this film co-directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End) an honorable failure rather than merely a mess.
Bee Season is a handsome looking film, with elegant Northern California settings and an occasionally playful visual sense, but emotionally it’s arid and uninvolving. The spiritual striving of one person is hard enough to evoke in movies, let alone four people related but moving in different directions. With the exception of Gere, who plays Saul as a wholly self-contained egocentric, none of these characters ever come to life as believable characters: they’re simply pieces in a game that someone else is playing.
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