Although originally a bestselling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees was always destined to be adapted into a mainstream Hollywood film.
It has cross-demographic appeal for parents who take their kids to see Dakota Fanning: The kids can enjoy an inspirational coming-of-age movie, and the parents can talk with their friends over coffee about the weighty themes of racial and social liberation.
It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of the difficulties involved in bringing Bees to the screen. In an interview with The Diamondback, director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) mentioned that, due to the film’s miniscule budget, the stars in the cast – such as Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys – essentially worked “without getting paid.”
Latifah later added that she was “honored to take a pay cut” because “these kinds of movies just don’t get made anymore.”
Upon viewing Bees, it quickly becomes apparent why the cast and crew were willing to make such sacrifices to get the film made. It delivers morally fulfilling entertainment without pandering excessively to the audience, and provides life lessons while mostly avoiding tiresome preachiness.
The story begins in hardscrabble rural South Carolina with the struggles of the film’s protagonist, Lily Owens (Fanning, Charlotte’s Web). Every day, Lily must battle with her demons, both from accidentally killing her mother and from the sadistic antagonism of her paranoid peach farmer father, T. Ray (Paul Bettany, Iron Man). An especially excruciating scene involves T. Ray’s preferred form of punishment of forcing Lily to kneel on grits for hours.
When her maid, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson, Sex and the City), is attacked by a mob of white racists, Lily sees an opportunity to escape while saving perhaps her only friend. With little but vague hopes, she sets off to Tiburon, S.C., searching for clues about her mother’s past and, essentially, a sense of family and belonging.
Predictably, she finds both in the form of the Boatwright sisters, a tight-knit group of black women who produce honey and seemingly exist in their own part of the world.
Latifah (What Happens in Vegas) plays the matriarch August, whom Latifah described as another one of the “strong female characters” she has “enjoyed” playing throughout her career. Keys (The Nanny Diaries) proves herself a perfectly capable actress portraying the cello-playing, cynical June.
Everything in Bees, from the standard – yet effective – cinematography to the chemistry of the ensemble cast, works adequately. The film is a well-oiled machine whose various parts fit together as intended. It is precisely this quality, however, that prevents Bees from achieving greatness.
The film occasionally attempts to progress beyond formula, only to be brought back down by the overbearing soundtrack and ineffective metaphors. Instead of providing a subtle parallel to the action on the screen, the big, dramatic ballads, inserted in no discernible order, do a disservice to some otherwise moving scenes.
As for the metaphors, Tristan Wilds (The Wire) defended the likening of bees to life by saying that the female bees “work[ing] so hard” mirrors the “dynamic of … the Boatwright sisters.” The CGI bees buzzing around the frame, however, eventually come to symbolize little more than a visual annoyance.
In addition, the film’s treatment of the majority of its black characters as saints and the majority of its white characters as sinners is hard to square away with its message of equality and acceptance. The moral ambiguity awkwardly thrust into the conclusion of the film reeks of artifice. Deploying pocketbook psychology to explain the motivations and actions of every character with clunky dialogue proves an ineffective way to address the complex themes presented by the novel.
For those who are perfectly content watching Latifah essentially playing Latifah for the umpteenth time and Hudson parading in period garb, Bees will not disappoint. It delivers Hollywood formula well, and even displays a few inklings of depth. Those who want their stories of redemption with a little more edge and insight, however, will walk away unmoved.
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RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
