Family portrait
“Bee Season” offers a fresh take on a familiar subject

by Judith Reynolds

It would be a cheap shot to say “Bee Season” is really a hornet’s nest. Compact and elegant on the outside, swarming within. So tightly written, so beautifully constructed, so rich in visual and aural metaphors, “Bee Season” entices the mind, stirs the imagination, and dazzles eye and ear. Only one misstep mars the film, now showing at the Abbey Theatre. Fortunately the boo-boo arrives after an ending you and your friends will argue about for days. Under the closing credits, Dominique Durand, lead singer with Ivy, a New York-based band, breathes bits of key dialogue into something resembling a song. It’s flabby and new agey, an afterthought that should have been junked. Ignore it.

Based on a novel by Myla Goldberg, who graduated from Oberlin College a mere decade ago, “Bee Season” opens with a portrait of a near-perfect family. Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have switched both location and parental occupations. Sunny California supplants bleak Pennsylvania. In the book, father Saul Naumann (Richard Gere) is a temple cantor; now he’s a Judaic scholar teaching at Berkeley. In print, mother Miriam (Juliette Binoche) is a brilliant lawyer; in the film she’s a scientist. At the beginning in print and on screen, the Naumanns shepherd a happy, well-oiled family unit.

Also unchanged are high parental expectations. Son Aaron, 16, (Max Minghella) is bright and talented. An accomplished cellist, he shares his father’s passion for after-dinner Bach. Eliza, 11, too pretty to be the proverbial ugly duckling, is quiet and self-contained. She finally discovers her intellectual gift – winning spelling competitions. The parents shift their attention to her, and minute cracks begin to appear in the family structure.

In all, the hype surrounding the film, much is made of its spiritual themes: a yearning for God, the search for connection, and the mystical aura of language. After all, “In the beginning was the Word.” A leap to American spelling bees had to be irresistible for both writer and filmmaker. That said, other themes are more powerful: identity, parent-child relations, the danger of unresolved traumas, and America’s embrace of competition as a way of life. The directors weave all these threads together in a fugue, as strong and intricate as the baroque partita Saul and Aaron play together after supper.

Because the film is also about imagination, the directors employ different ways to visualize inner life. That’s especially true for Eliza, about whom Goldberg wrote: “Since she was very small, Eliza has thought of the inside of her head as a movie theater.” What a natural, then, for the filmmakers to incorporate some animation. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens also visualizes metaphors for mental clarity and confusion – sunlight, shadow, complex reflections and, of course, shattered glass. All organically flow from the script.

“Bee Season” is an ensemble work, and the actors acquit themselves well. Cross looks as if she could be Binoche’s daughter and has an inner serenity welcome in a child actor. Minghella, son of the famous director Anthony, delivers a high-achieving teen-ager embarked on his own search for identity. So subtle is Binoche that we barely see the threshold of her compulsive behavior. And Gere, not exactly professorial material, embodies the passion of a true scholar and the behavior of a “good” husband.

“Bee Season” explores important contemporary themes in an intelligent way. It reminds us how thrilling a tightly structured and visually imaginative film can be. •