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Bee Season

Review By: J.P. Mangalindan
JPMangalindan@TheCinemaSource.com

I really wanted to like Bee Season — really, I did. But watching Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s adaptation left me wanting more of everything: more explanations, more exposition, more, well… sense.

The adaptation of Myla Goldberg’s beloved, bestselling film about — you guessed it — a spelling bee, occasionally has its charms, but for the most part, translates rather poorly to the big screen.

Having lived in the shadows of her cellist brother Aaron (Max Minghella), Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross) wants to please her father Saul (Richard Gere), a university professor who specializes in Jewish history and traditions. She finally has the chance when, to everyone’s surprise, she wins spelling bee after spelling bee, astounding her family with her unerring knack for words. Soon, Eliza finds herself invited not only to the nationals, but into the mystical realm of long-forgotten ritual and tradition that encompasses her distant father’s world.

Oddly, Eliza’s success triggers the onset of all sorts of problems for her family, shedding light on Saul’s less-than-perfect parenting, their mother’s (Juliette Binoche) psychological problems and Aaron’s adolescent desire to explore other religions (with the brief help of pixie-ish Kate Bosworth as Chali).

There are some pretty moments in Bee Season — Eliza’s channeling of words with surreal imagery — which occasionally buoy Bee Season into an entertaining watch, but the film feels too disjointed and lacking often. Probably the most obvious is the plot thread involving Juliette Binoche.

What the hell is going on with her?!

Here’s what we do know (*Warning. Spoiler Ahead*): She’s unhappy, she likes having sex on chairs, she’s the queen bee of kleptos, and she constantly remembers a traumatic car accident with her parents.

What we don’t know: Why exactly she’s unhappy, why she’s stealing everyone’s jewelry and accessories, what exactly happened in that car accident and what it has to do with her in the here and now.

Binoche, who’s in the habit of picking mystifying films like the recently released Cache (Hidden), plays the tortured wife with the tortured psyche well (and to the hilt), does well, but it’s hard to sympathize with someone when you have no clue what’s going on in that head of theirs and Bee Season never bothers to explain it, other than a few vasoline-lensed flashbacks that reveal next-to-nothing at all. Sure, there’s something about “shards” and a connection to an ancient Jewish theory about putting the broken back together again (Her happiness and sanity? Hm.), but it’s not enough to explain the method behind the madness.

And, while Eliza’s exploration of her newfound gift frames the story, I’m left slightly confused by it being both the problem and the remedy for shattering and fixing the family in the span of several months. As the catalyst for the disassembly of the Naumanns, I’ll admit it’s somewhat plausible with Gere’s overwhelming patriarch, but I missed the part where Eliza’s “mistake” at ...