Stingless

The Secret Life of Bees doesn’t come to us from Oprah Winfrey’s media conglomerate, but it would be easy to mistake it for one of her moral-instruction products. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s movie is amply provided with personal character challenges, inspirational ideas, lessons on recent American history and social problems, and melodramatic story lines. Oprah can’t be held responsible for this one, but it does have the Hollywood-royalty imprimatur of Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband Will Smith, who served as producers.

Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson in The Secret Life of Bees.

Young Dakota Fanning, who only recently was the focus of widely voiced concerns about her portrayal of a child rape victim in Hounddog (which hasn’t reached Western New York), stars as the 14-year-old heroine of Bees, a girl who’s faced with less extreme but very serious threats. In the summer of 1964, in rural South Carolina, Lily lives with her harshly unaffectionate father (the accomplished Paul Bettany in a restricted and unrewarding role) on a produce farm. Her mother, she’s been told, took French leave when the girl was four.

When a blowup with her father coincides with the brutalization and arrest by local racists of Rosalie (American Idol loser Jennifer Hudson showing signs of acting promise), the family housekeeper and the only source of warmth in her life, the two of them escape across the state in search of the reason for the mother’s sudden departure. They wind up at the home of August Boatwright (Queen Latifah), a beekeeper and honey manufacturer, who gives them refuge, hope, and, eventually, the keys to unlock a couple of mysteries in Lily’s life.

Bees is an oddly unsatisfying movie, almost across the board. For one thing, it’s rated PG-13, so parents are cautioned against permitting its most obvious audience—girls of about Lily’s age—to attend.

More substantially, dramatically the movie’s a dud. The script, taken by the director from a novel by Sue Monk Kidd, is an unwieldy mess. Beginning with the very first scene, incidents are left unexplained or dealt with in a desultory fashion that scarcely seems to justify their introduction. And despite the filmmakers’ obvious concern with conveying important historic lessons, they seem to have a strangely ahistorical comprehension of the Deep South of 40-odd years ago. To portray a white adolescent female who has witnessed savage racial bigotry sitting with a black boy in the “colored” section of a movie theater is confoundingly curious. (This is used as a plot device, but, typically, the movie just disposes of it arbitrarily.)

Fanning may be a genuine talent—she does have expressive eyes—but it’s hard to be certain from this awkwardly directed work. Latifah gives a too measured, uninvolving performance.

The story and social context of Bees probably have substantial potential, but the movie’s treatment of them is both superficial and muddled.